If all you have every day is five quick minutes to learn anything, start with these skills that can change your life. By making every single day an opportunity to learn, you are making yourself a very improved and intelligent individual. The best thing about these social skills is that they require little to no practice, and you can pretty much do them regardless of your age.
Learn to manage your time at work. Time management is necessary in just about every aspect of your life, across every age. You will need time management to succeed in your academics, time management to manage your personal life better, and you need to know how to schedule your day properly if you want to succeed in your home life.
Although multi-tasking sounds easy enough, not everyone can actually pull it off, and a great deal of people burn out faster when they multi-task than when they schedule their tasks throughout the day properly. If you want to live and work smart, learn how to utilize your time.
One effective time management system that you can apply in your own life is called the Pomodoro technique. This technique lets you distribute your work time allotment into 25-minute chunks, while the brief 5-minute period that follows is time allotted for your break. If you work in a busy office, you could use this method to focus on the work at hand for 25-minutes, then enjoy a brief 5-minute break shortly after.
Learn to stay healthy and prep healthy meals in less than 5 minutes. Preparing meals can be a huge time waster especially if you leave for work early in the morning. If you keep a 9-5 work schedule, you practically have an hour or two for getting ready in the morning. For busy individuals with other commitments, an hour or two is never enough.
Manage your time by prepping your meals the night before. There are plenty of recipes on the internet that teaches you how to store your meal in ziplocks and how you can get them ready in as little as 5 minutes the next day. Instead of heading out on an empty stomach, make sure you get your fill everyday with these easy prepared meals.
Present yourself in a more confident, yet accommodating manner. If you want to be more sociable, or if you want to be perceived as an approachable individual, start by fixing your posture when you stand. Standing up straight rather than slouching makes you look like a more confident individual. Couple that with a welcoming smile on your face, and you could be everyone’s best friend by the end of the month.
If training your body to maintain a good posture is difficult, you might want to consider working from a sit-and-stand desk rather than staying seated for a long time. Standing more than sitting stretches your back and trains it to support your frame.When you supplement this habit with back exercises, you can strengthen your lower back muscles so you can keep your good posture for hours.
Learn to tell at least one anecdote or one story. Most importantly, learn to captivate as you deliver your tale. Everyone likes a good conversationalist, but everyone will always remember a good storytelling. The gift of being able to tell a story is important in corporate environments; and when you master it, you master the gift of captivating an audience and getting them to agree with what you have to share.
The gift of gab, as many call it, is still an important skill to this day, so learn to make it your edge.
Learn to listen, and when you find yourself in a situation where you would have to sit with someone for hours, learn to look like you are sincerely interested in what they have to share. We all can’t be storytellers all the time; sometimes, the situation calls us to be someone’s confidante. When someone entrusts you with his ideas, thoughts, and even, secrets, play this role honorably.
Learn to read social cues. Conversations are like water-- they are fluid, and just about anything can disrupt the attention being granted to you by your listener. Save yourself and your audience from boredom, no matter how big or small, by reading their bodily movements and by steering their attention back to you when you begin to sense their disinterest.
Remember people’s names. It’s surprising how easily remembering people’s names has become some sort of a challenge rather than a normal thing anyone should be able to do. If your memory fails you at times, the easiest way to remember people’s names is to repeat it aloud whenever you can.
When you meet someone for the first time and they’ve gone ahead and given you their name, express your usual courtesies, but make sure to mention their name throughout your conversation once in awhile. Eventually, their names will stick to your memory, and it should be easier to recall their name the next time you meet.
