‘Life Skills for Success’: Useful Book by SAGE to enhance personal & professional skills

All walks and disciplines of human life are searching good book that can guide them how to recognize and how to utilize their potential strengths to achieve their goals and improve by acquiring the personal and professional skills they need to succeed in life. 

Although there are many books on Psychology of life style improvement, acquiring more skills, most of them go to extremes. The recently published book by SAGE publishing‘Life Skills for Success’ takes a different and fresh approach to help the readers improve their personal and professional skills by resolving every day challenges like personal relations, communication drawbacks, issues at work place – stress and health.

‘Life Skills for Success’ is authored by Dr. Alka Wadkar, former faculty member Department of Psychology, University of Pune, where she has taught for 30 years and is known for her socially relevant publications. She has written thirteen books and received seven state level awards for thought provoking research based books.

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The book ‘Life Skills for Success’ aims to help the reader develop the individual potentials by changing for better the environment, attitude and behaviour. The book categorically emphasizes that only the individual can himself change his life. Accordingly, while reading this book, one can know and utilize the positive outcomes of changes in thinking.

‘Life Skills for Success’ is divided into four broad parts on Self Awareness; Communicating and Thinking; Emotions and the last but not the least Relating to others. Each part of the book has 5-6 sub-sections elaborating on different potentials, qualities, values among others. Each part is supported by well carved out theoretical presentations, research and psychological applications. The language is clear and brings home the message well.

In the first part of the book, the author has divided the Self-Awareness into five sub-sections to explain the various facets how should one know oneself. The indepth discussion on  Self-Esteem, Motivation, Creativity, Values and Ethics and Self-management are good motivators of application of the knowledge to one self. Each sub section of Self Awareness has been lucidly explained with the support of data tables, diagrams, image and graphical representation.

The basic purpose of sharing the 1955 Johari Window (Created by Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham), in the very first section is to get insight into oneself leading to self understanding viz-a-viz other individuals.  

The part two on Communicating and Thinking is further sub-divided into six sub sections discussing cognitive processes. Author in this part has conveyed well that Problem solving and decision making depend on these cognitive processes of thinking, reasoning, assertiveness, misconceptions.

Issues are narrated and discussed with the help of cases and examples. The six forms of reasoning are well explained to understand what is logical and what is not. The approaches on thinking, importance of communication are very well explained.

‘Emotions’ – the core of the third part is sub divided into 5 sub sections namely Emotions, Emotional intelligence, Love and Happiness, Anger and Fear and above all Stress. The section well explains how and in what way the emotions are developed. How the childhood emotions and experience could influence your life and in what way it would lead you to understanding of self as well as others.

The last but not the least is the fourth part on ‘Relating to others’. This part discusses on how you could do away with the obstacles in relationships with others. This section covers key relationship criteria and focuses on empathy, friendship, leadership, first impression-your presentation skills, team building and interpersonal relationships. The example of Ramesh in the subsection of interpersonal relationships, helping his grandfather reluctantly and his mother makes him understand that he should be more polite towards his grandfather leads to the idea how a relationship can be improved.

At the close of each section the learning is summarised followed by questions to assess the section understanding followed by suggested readings to broaden the vision. In the end the book has rich bibliography that covers all the good reading on these topics.

One of the important features of the book is its contents and subsection titles shared in the beginning of each chapter which details about what you would be getting to read in each section. 

The book studies deep into all the aspects of psychological impact to improve one’s life with  best utilization and enhancement of one’s emotions, motivations, communication skills, values among others. The book uses new case studies and snapshots illustrating possible solutions in different psychological situations.  

‘Life Skills for Success’ will help the students, parents, households alike to understand ‘how to utilize their potentialities to the fullest with the help of Psychological orientation.’ The key takeaway after reading the book is the insight that the students and readers would develop on various aspects of self-orientation, style and way of communication, interpersonal and other professional skills.

Stay tuned to MBAUniverse.com for more updates on SAGE Publication Book reviews

See Also:

• Business-to-Business Marketing: Useful book by SAGE for B2B students & faculty
• ‘Campus to Corporate’: New book by SAGE on Learnability and Employability as key pillars of academics
• ‘Social Media Marketing’: A useful book by SAGE for B-schools to teach this ever evolving area