Capabilities for Personal Life

Capabilities are essential for a success of an enterprise, economy and countries. Similarly, capabilities are equally important for personal life. This is an attempt to classify required capabilities for life. Broadly, life capabilities can be classified into 4 parts:

1. Physical Capabilities
2. Emotional Capabilities
3. Livelihood Capabilities, and
4. Spiritual Capabilities

Physical Capabilities:

1. Consumption Management: Ability to consciously and moderately consume through all senses; avoidance of excess (sleep, food etc)
2. Fitness Management: Ability to develop and maintain physical fitness
3. Health Management: Ability to make good life choices to promote overall health and prevent sickness
4. Sickness Management: Ability to manage disease; and return physical health back to original condition

Emotional Capabilities:

1. Harmful Emotions Management: Ability to recognize signs of harmful emotions such as pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed, sloth and taking action to reduce its harmful effects. These forms of sins are evolutionary and hard to completely eliminate. Focus should be on changing the dimension of the sin from harmful to benign. As an example, while envy is harmful, admiration is a benign form, both resulting from social comparison. Negative emotions are typically not pleasurable to experience.
2. Positive Emotions Management: Ability to seek, sustain, and develop positive emotions such as joy, fulfillment, happiness, pleasures etc. Positive emotions are pleasurable to experience.
3. Mental Health Management: Ability to handle mood, stress, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, loneliness, depression, substance abuse, psychotic, obsessive compulsive disorders.
4. Relationship Management: Ability to develop, nurture and maintain relationships across family, friends, workplace and world at large.

Livelihood Capabilities:

1. Career Management: Ability to choose, develop and flourish in chosen career
2. Conflict Management: Ability to foresee and handle conflict; reduce the negative effects of conflict and enhance the positive outcomes for all parties involved
3. Decision Management: Ability to make decisions with proper thought and pivot as needed
4. Entertainment Management: Ability to entertain self, family, workplace and world at large
5. Environment Management: Ability to create suitable environment for self, family, friends, and colleagues
6. Finance Management: Ability to earn, spend, save and invest
7. Fulfillment Management: Ability to fulfill what one aspires for
8. Habit Management: Ability to start, develop and stop habits
9. Hobby Management: Ability to identify and develop hobby
10. Information Management: Ability to store and retrieve information
11. Learning Management: Ability to learn, retain and apply useful and useless knowledge
12. Legacy Management: Ability to think beyond one’s lifetime; ability to leave something behind in terms of lasting impact
13. Motivation Management: Ability to motivate oneself
14. Reputation Management: Ability to develop, nurture and maintain reputation across family, friends, workplace and world at large. This is a personal brand
15. Resilience Management: Ability to quickly recover from difficulties
16. Risk Management: Ability to anticipate risks and disasters and be prepared to handle with minimum disruption
17. Strengths Management: Ability to identify, develop, maintain and improve skills and strengths
18. Time Management: Ability to use time effectively across short and long term horizons

Spiritual Capabilities:

1. Belief Management: Ability to identify with and live by spiritual belief systems
2. Purpose Management: Ability to define and have clarify of life’s purpose
3. Virtues management: Ability to define and adhere to virtues such as faith, hope, charity, fortitude, justice, temperance, prudence, love, humility, kindness, abstinence, chastity, patience, liberality, diligence
4. Obligation Management: Ability to know and practice obligations required by religion or belief, such as periodic rituals, tithing etc
5. Knowledge Management: Ability to learn and contemplate on doctrines and scriptures
6. Revelation Management: Ability to establish relationship with God, and have the ability to communicate with God

Capability Assessment:

Capabilities need to be periodically assessed to understand how many of those are ‘fit for purpose’ and how many are below that level. ‘Fit for purpose’ can be defined as something that is good enough for oneself at a personal level. This is a relative scale and can vary from person to person. What is fit for me, may not be fit for another person.

Each capability may be assessed from 2 dimensions: planning dimension and execution dimension. To illustrate, when we assess ‘fitness management’, we may be very good at planning how to become fit. But when it comes to execution we may be very poor. For some capabilities, such as risk management, planning may be equally important as execution.

Once we identify the capabilities that are below the ‘fit for purpose’ levels, conscious effort needs to be put in place to improve them.

Capability Measures:

When we plan to improve the capability, we need some sort of measurement to know how well we are progressing in improving the capabilities. Capability measures play a major role in this. Here are some examples of capability measures.

Consumption Management: % time over-consumption; % time under-consumption

Fitness Management: Duration and Intensity of fitness related activities

Health Management: # of Wellness checkup; Lipid Panel Results

Sickness Management: Adherence to medication schedule; # of missed doctor visits

Harmful Emotions Management: # of days / times impacted by harmful emotions

Positive Emotions Management: # of days / times impacted by positive emotions

Mental Health Management: Frequency of mental health signs

Relationship Management: # of positive relationships, # of relationship events

Some of us have certain innate capabilities either because of genes or other such factors. Some capabilities that come naturally to us, may be harder for others.

This capability framework will help all of us be self aware of what we are good at, and what we need to improve on.