Hello there, friend.
Here is a truth worth holding close this morning: your life gets measured in something far richer than years. Dale Olen, author of the Life Skills Series, puts it beautifully. The real measure of a life well lived shows up in the zest, faith, love, honesty, and generosity you bring to yourself and to your relationships, every single day.
That one idea alone is worth the whole journey.
Meeting Life Head On is the heart of Olen’s ten-volume series, a warm, practical, and deeply human framework for becoming the kind of person who shows up fully for their own life. Today we walk through all ten skills, the three inner resources that make learning them possible, and why every single one of them belongs inside a morning practice built around presence, growth, and joy.
What the Life Skills Series Teaches
Olen organizes the full series around ten learnable, practiceable skills, divided into two beautifully logical tiers.
The Three Foundation Skills
These three arrive first, because everything else grows from them:
1. Accepting Yourself
This is the ground floor of all genuine growth. Before any skill can truly take root, you bring honest and compassionate attention to who you already are, exactly as you are, right now. Self-acceptance opens every door.
2. Thinking Reasonably
Clear, grounded thinking shapes every single response you bring to life’s events. This skill invites you to examine your beliefs carefully and consciously choose the ones that genuinely serve your highest good.
3. Meeting Life Head On
The title skill and the beating heart of the series. Olen’s invitation here is both simple and profoundly liberating: face what is real, stay fully present with it, and move toward life rather than away from it. This is courage made practical.
The Seven Special Skills
Once the foundation holds steady, these seven skills deepen and expand your capacity to live fully:
4. Communicating
Speaking and listening with full presence, honesty, and warmth.
5. Managing Stress
Meeting the pressures and demands of daily life with resourcefulness, steadiness, and grace.
6. Being Intimate
Bringing your whole, open self into real connection with the people who matter most to you.
7. Resolving Conflict
Transforming friction and misunderstanding into deeper understanding and mutual growth.
8. Reducing Anger
Transforming reactive heat into clear, purposeful, and constructive energy.
9. Overcoming Fear
Moving forward with courage and full presence, even when life presents its most challenging invitations.
10. Defeating Depression
Reclaiming aliveness, genuine joy, and forward momentum, one small, steady, courageous step at a time.
The Three Inner Resources That Make Growth Possible
every one of these skills is fully learnable. And he identifies with beautiful clarity exactly what the learning process calls forward from within you.
Awareness
Everything begins here. You bring honest, gentle attention to your own behavior and patterns, to your genuine strengths and the places where you sense your readiness to grow. Awareness, Olen teaches, opens the whole door to change and is itself a profound act of self-respect.
Desire
Once you recognize the value of a skill and feel its possibility clearly, desire carries you forward. It keeps you going when the learning feels demanding. This inner force transforms intention into living, breathing practice.
Effort and Practice
Here is where everything becomes real. The books themselves serve as guides and companions along the way, and your daily effort and practice are what bring the skills alive and weave them permanently into who you are becoming.
Why These Skills Live Beautifully Inside a Morning Practice
Every skill on this list calls forward the same fundamental move: showing up fully, with honesty and courage, to your own one precious life. And that is exactly what a morning practice makes possible, one breath, one reflection, one intentional and loving choice at a time.
Accepting yourself, thinking with clarity, communicating with openness, managing stress with steadiness and grace — these qualities grow through daily attention, exactly the kind of warm, consistent, purposeful attention a well-designed morning practice creates space for.
The happiness science series here on Start Early Today explores the research behind why daily practice genuinely reshapes the brain and builds these capacities over time.
For the contemplative side of this inner work, including stillness, self-compassion, and deeply intentional living, visit Make Pure Thy Heart.
The Truest Measure of a Life Well Lived
Your life measures itself in zest, faith, love, honesty, and generosity — brought fully to yourself and to your relationships.
That is the whole practice. Every morning you rise and choose awareness over autopilot, presence over performance, courage over avoidance, you are actively and joyfully building exactly that kind of life. And you already have everything you need to begin.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Dale Olen’s Life Skills Series about?
It is a ten-volume practical series teaching the foundational skills for a full, honest, and deeply connected life, organized around three core skills and seven special skills that build beautifully on them.
What are the three most important life skills according to Dale Olen?
accepting yourself, thinking reasonably, and meeting life head on as the three foundation skills from which everything else grows.
How do you learn life skills according to the book?
Olen teaches that growth calls for three inner resources: awareness (honest and compassionate self-observation), desire (genuine motivation to pursue the skill), and sustained effort and practice over time.
How does Meeting Life Head On connect to a morning practice?
A morning practice creates the daily conditions in which all ten skills naturally develop and deepen. Awareness, self-acceptance, clear thinking, and emotional steadiness all strengthen through consistent, intentional, loving daily attention.
Where can I find Dale Olen’s Meeting Life Head On?
The book is available through Amazon and used booksellers including ThriftBooks and AbeBooks, often for just a few dollars.
Continue the Practice
Explore the full happiness science series here on Start Early Today, and visit Make Pure Thy Heart for the contemplative and intentional living side of this same philosophy.
With warmth and presence,
Paolo