Learning and Development Archives - Page 8 of 36

Starting Your Personal Development Journey

There is a Chinese quote ascribed to Laozi although sometimes also to Confucius that goes “a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.” So it is when we set off on a journey of Personal Development.

When you first start your personal development journey, it can be tempting to take short cuts. You think that you already know who you are, what you want, and what you stand for, and how to exemplify that. However, that’s not how the human mind works.

Often, we hide truths from ourselves and are not honest with ourselves about these issues. For this reason, the following ideas will hopefully help you think about how you approach starting your personal development journey so that you will succeed.

Don’t Skip the SWOT – It’s imperative that you perform analysis on yourself in every aspect of your life to find out what strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats you face for any of the target issues you want to address. For example, if you perform a SWOT and realize that you’re not very good at something, you then have a choice. You can find someone who is to do it for you, or you can find training to learn to do it.

Nurture Your Strengths – When you perform the SWOT for any sector of your life, you’ll also identify your strengths. The best thing to do in life is to choose to lead with your strengths. You want to keep doing the things you’re strong at and learn to do them even better since you’re obviously interested in those things.

Improve Your Weaknesses – When you find out that you are weak in some area, you’ll need to determine whether you should improve it yourself or improve it by outsourcing it. To determine which is better, ask yourself whether it really matters who does it or just that it is done.

Understand The 3 Domains of Personal Development – They are, physical, cognitive, and social-emotional. Together, these domains cover all aspects of your life, including health, work, personal growth, spiritual life, and so forth. Working on all aspects of your life usually is much better than focusing only on one as they are sometimes indistinguishable.

Plan for Action – As you work through crafting your plan, nothing is done until you’ve set up action-packed steps and put them in your calendar scheduled for you to implement them. Whether you are doing it yourself, or outsourcing it, doing is the most critical part of the plan.

Focus on The Right Target Issue First – One reason it’s helpful to go through every single domain and issue you have before setting up a plan is that it helps you to know which issue to focus on first. For example, you cannot write a novel until you can read, and you can’t learn to write until you can read, first things first.

Be Persistent – Once you have your action plan, which is developed based on reality and not on how you wish it to be, you only now need to be persistent and take the steps to success. It truly is that easy. Once you have the steps scheduled in your calendar and you start implementing them, your life will begin to change.

Get a Coach – If you understand everything but your implementation skills leave something more to be desired, you may want to employ a life coach to help you. If you know some life coaches who specialize in personal development, you might want to talk to them. If you don’t know anyone, ask your colleagues for recommendations. It’s likely they will know someone or can direct you to someone who would know more on the topic.

One thing to remember about personal development is that it’s an ongoing process. You’re never done with it. There is no real finish line. For this reason, it’s best to develop tenacity and persistence as you follow the path you’ve created for yourself, adjusting as you go based on facts, and learning about what is really and truly important to you deep in your subconscious. It’s all about knowing who you are and living a life that illustrates who you are.

Do You Need a Personal Development Plan?

In my last post I looked at the importance of understanding our own core values and beliefs in order to focus on areas for development. I now want to start to take a look at how we formalise our own development. Do you really need a Personal Development Plan? If we consider that Personal Development is a process that you will work on for your entire life then, to me at least, it makes sense to have a plan for how you are going to approach it!

What is the Purpose of a Personal Development Plan?

It will help you assess your skills, qualities, and will help you build the lifestyle and life that you envision that you desire for happiness and a high quality of life. The personal development plan can help you with all aspects of your life and help you become more self-aware at home and at work.

Perform a SWOT on Your Life

A well-designed personal development plan will address your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and roadblocks or threats in all areas of your life that you develop. Your plan will identify your strengths so that you can improve them, your weaknesses are so that you can make up for them, and new opportunities, so you know when a door (or window) is open, as well as noting any roadblocks or threats along the way.

Recognise Development Areas

When you perform your SWOT in each area of your life, you will discover internal and external things that are blocking your success. For example, you may hold the belief you’ll never have enough money to save for the future. Because of that, when you do get “extra” money, you tend to blow it right away on all the things you feel you missed out on before. This is a limiting belief about money that a lot of people have because most people think money is a finite resource when it’s not. It’s manmade. Therefore, we can make more.

Identify Your Resources

You may do some work that helps you look at the resource you have available to do a specific task. For example, if you decide you want to start a coaching business, what resources do you have to start it. What things do you need, what things can you live without, what can you do yourself, what does someone else need to do. This works in every single aspect of your life. You may realize you already have all the skills inside to do exactly what you wanted to do. However, you may realize that you need to pay for additional brainpower (resources).

Build Better Relationships

One of the most shocking aspects of creating a self-development plan is how much it can help relationships. When you realize that you only control your own behavior and actions, it starts to get easier to manage relationships. Treating them how you want to be treated is an excellent start but becoming self-aware enough to go farther and realize that not everyone likes what you like so you may need to treat someone the way they like to be treated instead.

Whatever you want to work on can be done via the personal development plan. Whether you want to lose weight, start a business, change jobs, or go back to school – the goal doesn’t matter as much as developing the plan that you need to get where you want to go. Your plan will not be the same as anyone else’s because you are different. That’s why it’s so consequential and unique because it’s just for you.

Not Meeting Your Goals?

Most of us have goals that we want to achieve. Some may have long-term retirement goals; others may have aims relating to their personal life or to their body (did anyone say, weight loss?!).

But goals, and especially long-term ones, can be extremely difficult to achieve. If you find yourself stuck and not making any progress (or making minimal progress) towards them, what are you to do? In this article, find out some good strategies to use if you aren’t making the progress that you would like towards your goals.

Stop and Take Stock

If you aren’t making progress towards your goals, then you need to stop and take stock. This doesn’t just mean a quick, 5-minute reflection either.

You have to sit down and seriously take stock. Are you doing everything that you need to do to reach your goal? Are you doing things efficiently? For example, if you aren’t losing the amount of weight that you want to be losing, then take a serious look at your diet and exercise routine. Is it working? Could you be doing more?

Be Your Best

Do you work to be your best? I was reading earlier and came across the following quote from Ralph Marston

“Don’t lower your expectations to meet your performance. Raise your level of performance to meet your expectations. Expect the best of yourself, and then do what is necessary to make it a reality. “

It’s Not True That………

Whether we are aware of it or not each of us has a set of core values and beliefs about life. These core values and beliefs influence the vision we have of the future and even sometimes the past.

These core values and beliefs are often developed in childhood and for many of us these ideas come from our parents, but they also come from general society. The TV shows you watched growing up, the friends you had, their parents, your teachers and whatever was happening in the world as you grew up that is reflected on the news affects your values and beliefs as well.

Many of these things we don’t even realise are there. Therefore, we will sometimes react unconsciously to things that strike at those core values and beliefs. Sometimes those actions lead us down the wrong path. Working on our personal development can enable us to become much more self-aware about our core values and beliefs and why we have specific ideas or not.

Positive & Negative Core Beliefs

Everyone has both positive and negative core beliefs. The more positive thoughts you have, the more positive you will behave, as you embark on achievement. These positive beliefs include things like believing you are worthy, safe, competent and capable, appreciated, accepted, knowledgeable, and so forth.

Negative beliefs are often focused and based on your personality or inner-self, as well as on a negative thought that someone had about you or based on something you said about yourself. These can be very limiting to your self-esteem. That’s why you can meet two people, who have the same job, make the same amount of money, and one will be happy and satisfied, while the other person will inwardly feel miserable.

Finding Out Core Values & Beliefs are Negative

You may not even realise you have beliefs that are causing you to be held back. If you’ve watched person after person succeed at something that you want to do, are you able to identify how to improve it or are you not able to accept that a core idea or belief you have is holding you back?

Are You Willing to Change?

If you want to embark on a journey of personal development, you need to be willing to challenge your core beliefs, ideas, and even the vision you have created for your life. Until you know what’s true, accurate, and based on facts rather simply on opinions or false beliefs, it’ll be hard to envision how far you can go towards the advancements you want to make. It may be the difference between deciding to become a Doctor or a Nurse. Neither career is a wrong choice. However, one might be better for you, when considering your likes, dislikes, existing skills, your health, and your interests, goals, and other preferences.

As you work through your development plan in all aspects of your life, you’ll come to many surprising realisations. Some of them will be a surprise, others, not so much. The critical point is to realise that the ideas you have right now, even your most core beliefs and values may change once you find out it’s not true. For instance, it’s not true that you can’t lose weight. It’s not true that you cannot start your own business. It’s not true that you aren’t good enough. If you find that you have limiting core beliefs and values, you will want to work on those first. Without the inside taken care of, it’s hard to fix everything else.