Personal Development: What It Is and How It Works
What is Personal Development?
Personal development is one of the two pillars of lifelong learning and constant improvement. It is crucial to develop yourself continuously to improve your personal & professional game to grow in all areas of your life.
Important areas of life:
How Does Personal Development Work?
So often we continue to improve our professional skills and forget to work on our soft skills. Whether it is learning software, keeping up with legal matters, meeting deadlines or any other professional goal, we often put most of our energies towards our professional development.
However, it is hard to grow if you lack personal development skills. Higher up in the rank you are, the more important it gets.
Who would you prefer to work more?
A highly qualified boss who always questions your abilities or a reasonably skilled leader who practice empathy?
Personal development helps you learn how to practice empathy and to be a servant leader.
Personal Development Areas
Personal development is an infinite game, and the following are the essential personal development areas one should concentrate on improving continually.
Mindset
“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” Napoleon Hill
Jack Canfield, who has been teaching entrepreneurs, educators, corporate leaders, and people from all walks of life how to create the life they desire for over 40 years attributes much of his success to the importance of mindset, meditation, and masterminding.
Changing your mindset and the way you think about the world around you will open you up to new possibilities happening all around you.
Goal Setting
Goal setting is a significant component of personal-development. Clarity of your life goals gives you direction in life.
“If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes.” – Andrew Carnegie
Your goals help you:
- Navigate through life
- Know your life purpose
- Review your progress
Several studies have found out that your brain starts looking for information, resources, and opportunities as soon as you give any goal to your subconscious mind.
The human mind is capable to figure out how to achieve any goal once we give it a goal.
Stress Management
Growth in life usually brings more stress. It is part and parcel of life. It is hard to avoid it, but you can learn how to manage it.
Here are some examples when you grow in your job or business:
- More substantial decisions to make
- It is difficult to self manage and quite harder to manage others
- Easier to work alone but challenging to hire people when your business grows
Getting better at managing stress help you grow professionally without losing your health.
Habits
A research conducted by researchers at Duke University, habits account for about 40 per cent of our behaviours on any given day.
What have you achieved so far in life, whether it is good or bad is essentially the sum of your habits.
- Your Health: A sum of your eating, sleeping and workout habits.
- Relationships: A sum of your gratitude & caring habits.
- Your Savings Balance: A sum of your savings habits.
- Quality of Your Skills: A sum of your daily practice and learning habits.
- Leadership: A sum of your lifelong learning habits.
Auditing your daily habits regularly and doing more of what is working for you and excluding, which isn’t; must be an essential part of your personal development plan.
Health
“I believe that the greatest gift you can give your family and the world is a healthy you.” Joyce Meyer
While pursuing your life goals, it is vital to remember that health is real wealth. Stresses of daily life affect your health, and it is the reason that most top performers pay special attention to their health.
They say you should take care of your health, not for the longevity of life; instead, for the quality of life.
Travel
Humans are good at learning things by observing others, and an act of travelling gives you immense learning opportunities. If you want to have a competitive edge in life, then travel the world when possible.
It’s hard to understand different cultures and how people do things around the world unless you witness it yourself.
Travelling helps you:
- Get out of your comfort zone.
- Understand different cultures and societies.
- Explore new ways of doing things.
- Learn from local people.
- Increase your confidence in general.
Regular Reviews
They say what gets measured gets managed.
Review of a personal development plan is a powerful process. You should have this in place to review your progress regularly to measure what is working and what isn’t.
Based on your circumstances, you can choose to review the following, daily, weekly, monthly or annually to stay on track.
- What went well?
- What didn’t go well?
- What did I learn & how can I improve?
By doing the regular review of your personal development, you can reap the benefits of your lifelong learning.
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