A Brief Introduction to Life Skills IQ Training

Most people understand that life skills are essential to living a successful, resilient, balanced, and fulfilling life. Life skills equip individuals with the practical tools, social skills, emotional intelligence, and psychological resilience needed to navigate life’s changes and mental health challenges. However, these skills are rarely taught in the family, in school, at work, or in the community anymore. John Liptak, in his bestselling book, Life Skills IQ, suggested that life skills are more important than traditional intelligence quotient (IQ) because they surpass traditional academic knowledge. 

Because of this, life skills have become an integral component of clinical treatment. Therapists find that many of the problems clients present revolve around an inability to meet their deficiency, growth, and high-level needs because of a lack of vital life skills. Therapists are finding that life skills can be taught to help clients manage mental health challenges, transitions, trauma, addiction, coping, anxiety, and interpersonal relationships.

Liptak suggested that therapists can teach clients critical life skills to build practical competencies, manage symptoms, reduce feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, develop and maintain supportive relationships, enhance overall well-being, and foster personal independence. The Life Skills IQ Training process is a unique framework that helps therapists bridge the gap between mental illness and mental health. In general, life skills programs have typically integrated life skills training into therapy by combining education, repetition, and the application of learning to help clients develop practical knowledge, skills, and abilities that improve daily functioning, mental health, and overall wellness. While this rudimentary process is effective, Liptak believed that a more sophisticated cognitive-behavioral approach to building life skills intelligence was needed to build resilience for long-term success.

Liptak believed that an effective therapeutic life skills approach needed to incorporate a mental health and wellness framework that integrates life skills therapy and cognitive-behavioral techniques into a holistic mental health treatment model. With the Life Skills IQ mental health framework, Liptak asserts that people can build mental health skills to manage stress, sadness, anxiety, trauma, and DSM mental health conditions. This approach allows clients to manage change, overcome challenges, and remove problematic barriers that keep them from succeeding in their personal and social lives.

Over the years, John has integrated the Life Skills IQ Training process into all his Whole Person Associates mental health and wellness reproducible workbooks and card decks. Four cognitive-behavioral steps are bridging the gap from mental illness to mental health using four cognitive-behavioral steps to raise Life Skills IQ:

· Step 1 - Pattern Identification: Therapist administers self-assessments from the workbook to help clients self-reflect to identify unconscious habits related to the presenting problem, primary concern, or DSM diagnosis.

· Step 2 – Focused Storytelling: Therapist uses journaling activities in the workbook to uncover hidden patterns of life skills and personality issues, moving them from unconscious to conscious awareness.

· Step 3 – Intentional Upskilling: Therapist teaches life skills included in the workbook to help clients learn specific life skills, use repetition to rewire their brains, and move from mental illness to mental health.

· Step 4 – Habit Formation: Therapists use the activities from each chapter to help clients practice life skills to form positive attitudes, create healthy habits, and reshape their thinking, feeling, and acting (T-F-A) through personality plasticity.

The Life Skills IQ Training Model provides a process that empowers people to live mentally healthy lives. This model is used in Whole Person Associates' reproducible workbooks to help therapists guide clients develop greater life skill strength that can be used to address current mental health concerns and prevent similar concerns in the future.