Personal Skills for Body and Mind
Perhaps the most fundamental of all skills are those concerned with self-preservation – that is, staying healthy in both body and mind. This section of SkillsYouNeed covers some simple ideas that can help you maintain a healthy lifestyle.
Without good personal (or intra-personal) skills you are less likely to be able to develop good interpersonal, presentation or leadership skills.
A Healthy Mind
Personal Development
Personal development skills are the skills you need to enable you to set personal goals and to achieve personal empowerment. Build a strong and effective skill-set through personal development that will help you to make relevant and positive choices and decisions in the future.
Our Study Skills, not just for students, will help you develop your learning potential. Learning how to learn is central to personal development.
Personal Development and Personal Empowerment provide a framework for setting personal goals and achieving your potential in life. Become more self-aware, learn to recognise your strengths and weaknesses and those of other people. Learn how to use language positively to encourage self-empowerment and also to help empower others. Remove the barriers to learning and developing yourself and start to develop new skills today. Personal development and personal empowerment skills are the foundations of other key life skills.
Building Confidence and Self-Esteem
How we feel about ourselves impacts on many aspects of our lives. By developing confidence and self-esteem we can overcome barriers and learn to accept our own strengths and weaknesses. Our pages explore the meanings of confidence and self-esteem and provide ideas of how they may be improved in ourselves and others. See: Building Confidence and What is Self-Esteem?
Time Management
The way that we manage our time has a direct effect on how we feel. Our introduction to time management page outlines some of the ways you can improve your effectiveness at getting things done – achieve more and feel more motivated and self-confident. Priorities, categorise and organise your time to maximum benefit.
Tips to avoid wasting time – our lives are often full of things that waste time or distract us from doing what’s important. Follow our simple tips and reduce these distractions, leaving more time to achieve your goals.
Stress and Stress Management
Stress is common in modern life, many of us have many demands that we feel we constantly need to balance – work, family, money, health and so on. Stress can make you seriously ill, we hope you will find our stress pages useful for helping you reduce, manage and avoid stress in your life.
- What is Stress? – This page is an introduction to stress, you should start here to learn more about what causes stress in yourself and others and how this stress may manifest in behaviour.
- Avoiding Stress – By understanding why we get stressed and what the triggers for stress are we can potentially avoid or minimise stressful situations. Discover some ways in which stress can be avoided and some tips on relaxation.
- Stress, Nutrition and Diet – Learn about the relationship between what we eat and how stressed we feel. Improve your diet, feel better about yourself, enjoy life, gain confidence and reduce stress.
- Stress in the Workplace – Workplace stress is common and responsible for many lost work days. Why do people get stressed at work, what can be done to alleviate the problem and does your employer have a duty to minimise workplace stress?
- Tips for Dealing with Stress – Practical and simple ways that you can deal with and help combat stress in your life.
- Relaxation Techniques – Learn some simple and effective ways to relax.
Assertiveness
Developing assertiveness skills is important for self-development. Assertiveness is not about being aggressive or passive but a tool we use to develop an understanding of ourselves and communicate or beliefs, values and opinions to others.
Visit our assertiveness pages for more:
- Assertiveness (An Introduction)
- Why People are not Assertive
- Dealing with Non-Assertiveness
- Assertiveness Techniques
Anger, Anger Management and Aggression
We all get angry at some time in our lives, anger is a natural emotion that can be triggered by stress, frustration, feelings of wrong-doing and other factors. Anger should not be thought of as a negative emotion but rather a natural release – we all handle and manage anger in different ways. Learn more about anger and how to manage it, see our pages on:
Aggressive behaviour towards others is unacceptable and a criminal offence in many countries. As we are all aware aggression can be very damaging both psychologically and physically for all involved.
See our pages on Dealing with Aggression and Recognising Aggression in Others.
A Healthy Body
Sleep
Although extensive research has been carried out we still don’t know exactly why we need sleep. What we do know is that sleep is very important to our personal wellbeing and that lack of sleep can be dangerous. Explore and learn more about what we spend a third of our lives doing: What is Sleep? and Sleep in Practice – The Importance of Sleep.
Nutrition
The phrase ‘you are what you eat’ has become a bit of a cliché over recent years. Most of us know that modern diets can contain too many processed foods that are high in fats, sugar and salt and that we should eat more fresh fruit and vegetables as part of a healthy balanced diet. Obesity, high cholesterol levels, high blood pressure and type-two diabetes are all common problems in modern life and often a direct result of poor diets. Our pages on diet and nutrition explain what your body needs and why – how some simple changes to your diet can make big differences to your wellness, increasing your energy levels, lifting your spirit and, hopefully, reducing the likelihood of becoming ill.