As you are journeying through life, are you continuing to build the life skills that underpin your growing maturity and success through life, or will you revel in being both ignorant and arrogant?

Life Skills for Life’s Journey

In episode 58 of Real Talk for Real Men, Chris and Guy encourage you to stop and think about how well you are taking responsibility for building the life skills required to achieve what you want in life.

You can stream this episode here:

In this episode, Chris and Guy reflect on life’s journey so far; they tease out some of the vital life skills needed to ensure we don’t stay stuck repeating the same mistakes with the same consequences, stifling our maturity and the fulfillment of our great life purposes.

Here are some of the basic life skills Chris and Guy explore in this episode:

1. Being Ignorant and Arrogant

There is a saying:

“What do you mean ignorant and arrogant? …
Anyway, I don’t know what you mean and I don’t care!”

No, we’re not saying you need to have ignorance and arrogance as life skills… au contraire!

But rather, that a vital life skill that we must build is to learn to recognise when we are ignorant and arrogant.

It doesn’t matter where or when you live, whether old or young — the same underlying challenges keep coming up in life:

Things like getting offended by someone … having our pride hurt … laziness … making wrong assumptions … many things that show up in different ways, but are the same core problem.  So the sooner we can acknowledge our ignorance and arrogance, the better we will handle life’s problems and avoid the “hard way” consequences more often.

The difficulty of course is that to do so is against our human nature.  Unless we actively fight it, our natural first reaction is the selfish one.

The second problem is that you can get away with being ignorant and arrogant for a while — especially if you are like a fish in small pond. But when you move to the ocean, your lack of life skills in dealing with this will have unpleasant, relationship-destroying consequences.

2. Responsibility

A saying Guy often uses with his kids is this:

“Choose the easy way or the hard way.”

And his kids most times stop and think. A hardened heart will choose the hard way with the arrogance to think that they can avoid the natural consequences, but this warning will often turn them to realising that learning basic life skills requires us to learn to put aside our arrogance and choose the path of least resistance.

Yes, sometimes the hard road is the right road, but when the hard road is a response to neglecting our responsibilities, then its not the right road.

What responsibilities are you neglecting right now?

In your marriage?  … with your kids? … at work?

An essential life skill is responsibility for what is ours to take, and leaving others to take theirs.

3. Continuing to Grow Relationship Skills

Chris likes a saying [editor: and given he’s 65, it suits him!]

“Its hard to put an old head on young shoulders”

Because as brilliant at dealing with people as Chris is (as a pastor of a church, public speaker, counselor and former TV and radio guy), he knows that he will never be perfect at dealing with people.

Guy also knows, as a father of 9, former corporate executive and now life coach, that getting better at dealing with people is an essential life skill that must continue to be worked on.

And so a super important life skill is to prioritise getting good at unselfishly loving others. Getting better at relating to others.  It is such an important life skill.

4. Your Identity Bone-Deep

I remember being told as a young married 20-something that I was a DINK: Double Income No Kids.

Increasingly today, we are living in a time when our identity is tied to ever-shifting identity groups.  Groups like “left-wing” or “right-wing” or “white male” or “LGBTQ” or some other group.

But what matters is not the shifting sands of group identity, but your true identity. Your BONE DEEP identity.

As it is challenged perfectly in the movie Overcomer (clip below).

So what’s your real identity?  Who are you really?

Learning how to discover your identity is a vital life skill that has flow on affects into all areas of your life.

5. Knowing Your Maker

And the 5th essential life skill Guy and Chris discuss on this episode is learning to know God more fully from your first breath to your last.

The apostle Paul put it this way in the Bible in Colossians 1:9

We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of His will
through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives…

To build in the knowledge of God.

Wisdom starts with revering God, but that is just the beginning.  If we are really to succeed in life in ways that will be truly lasting, we need to seek out and find God and learn to know Him — not just know of Him.

Sometimes we take steps backwards, but he is always waiting for you and I to come looking for Him again.

Life’s journey requires us to build the life skill of chasing God, that we might know Him.

How we relate to God and people IS our life journey.
~ Chris Field

How are you going with developing these life skills?

We will fail from time to time, but if we remember that life’s journey and the basic life skills we need pivot not around money, power, influence and entertainment, but on continuing to improve in the way we relate to people, and continuing to improve our relationship with God, we will succeed in the end.

Life’s journey is about genuinely learning to love those around us in unselfish ways, which brings to us many unexpected and priceless rewards.

Here is the episode link again:

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Resources:

Here are some other resources you might find helpful —

Ebook:

• The 7 Pillars of Real Men (5 ebook bundle)

Blog posts:

• Who am I? – discovering my identity
• Knowing your identity
• When the spotlight fades