Book: Handbook of Lifeskills: Your Personal Life Coach

Author: Neerja Bhatnagar

Genre: Self-help

Format: eBook

Life skills are an important part of everyone’s life. From our childhood, we start learning crucial life skills from our parents, elders of the family, teachers, and whomever we consider our trainers or mentor.

Although I believe the most important skills are left unlearned until you get to that point of life when you learn them yourself. However, there are some life skills that are indeed helpful in daily life to make things easier and help us focus on our life’s priorities with a clear vision.

Neerja Bhatnagar’s book is one of them. This book consists of twenty-three chapters that offer the reader a detailed look at crucial life skills like Decision Making, Problem Solving, Critical Thinking, Stress Management, etc.

With more than twenty-five life skills included in the book, it is indeed a handy guide for all of us to get a quick view of the steps and follow them to reach our goals.

Book Cover:

I liked the book cover. The central image of the book cover is a graphic of a person teaching his student and joining the puzzles on the board. This graphic representation of teaching important life skills instantly caught my attention and the author received my appreciation for choosing such a relevant, catchy, and apt book cover.

Author Bio:

Neerja is a physicist by education, a teacher by training, and now an enthusiastic digital content creator. She is the co-founder of Karmbhoomi Ahmedabad, an Ahmedabad-based organization that works for women in the fields of literature, art, and culture. Her digital footprints can be found in her two blogs, YouTube channel, and a few podcast channels. You can connect with her by following or subscribing to her channels on different platforms.

Email – motivationalmata@gmail.com

The Blurb:

The Handbook of Lifeskills is a comprehensive guide that provides readers with practical advice and exercises for developing a range of critical life skills. It covers topics such as communication, decision-making, problem-solving, stress management, and relationship-building, among others. The book is written in an easy-to-understand language and includes real-life examples, making it accessible to individuals of all ages and backgrounds. It aims to help readers enhance their personal and professional lives by developing the necessary skills to navigate through various challenges effectively.

Structure of the Book:

Firstly, I would like to appreciate the author for her research behind the presentation of each chapter. She would have easily opted to describe the life skills with lots of information and repeatedly said the same thing.

But instead, she gave a keen eye to formatting the chapters with only the necessary information that will help the reader better understand the usefulness of the life skill and practice to master them in the future.

So, the format of each chapter follows:

1. Introduction to the life skill
2. Ways to practice and improve
3. Advantages of developing the skill

This way, at the end of the chapters, the reader will learn a lot about life skills. Moreover, it encourages him to take the first step to practice the steps right from tomorrow!

After all, just like the ‘Home Alone’ boy Kevin, we strongly need to be equipped with these vital life skills to win over difficulties.

Writing Style:

The book is written in a lucid style. While reading, I felt it was descriptive at times because the author shared vital information about life skills and highlighted the advantages of developing them. As the book is written in simple language, readers can easily understand what the author wanted to convey to them.

Also, the format of each chapter is nicely done because after finishing reading, the reader will easily remember what he has learned from the book and come back to the chapters to revise the learnings whenever he wants.

However, this is a friendly suggestion to the author if she could add a personal touch to the book, it would impact better in the readers’ minds as we could relate to the words more deeply.

A Quote to Remember:

“Life skills are the abilities and knowledge necessary to navigate and adapt to the challenges of everyday life.”

– Neerja Bhatnagar

What Makes the Difference:

A non-fiction book becomes more appealing to the reader when the author adds personal experience or small anecdotes or true stories to give a real-life example of the scenario. Author Neerja Bhatnagar has done it right.

One of the best parts of this book is the true stories included at the beginning of each chapter. Some stories are from renowned people wherein others are from common people yet they are equally inspirational.

From these stories, readers will get a better insight into the life skill discussed in that chapter. Therefore, it becomes easy to understand how we can incorporate life skills for our betterment.

For instance, the book starts with an example of the movie ‘Home Alone’ and how the boy used his life skills to overcome challenging situations. Adding these stories and examples narrated as short stories uplifts the reader’s mood, breaks the monotony, and makes the chapter more interesting.

Some Important Highlights:

One thing that I liked about this book is the author has shared steps to develop that particular life skill and the advantages of using this in our daily life.

For me, it becomes easier to note down my takeaways from this book and follow the instructions to practice these life skills to get the best out of them.

Additionally, the author has beautifully described some vital things like critical reasoning, empathy, emotional intelligence, innovation skills, self-care skills, personal branding skills, etc. which we occasionally forget to involve in our daily life. Therefore, this book is a reminder for us to use basic life skills as equipment to fight against the odds and build resilience.

My Recommendation:

This book is like a handy guide for those who want to know about the basic life skills to learn. Life skills are important to cope with stress, overcome challenges, and build a strong personality.

Therefore, if the readers want to learn about basic life skills and steps to practice them regularly, it could be a good read for them.

Buy the book here.

(This review has been written as part of the Blogchatter Book Review Program. I received the review copy for an honest and unbiased review. All opinions are my own.)

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