Professional Development Archives

Quick Self-Confidence Boosters That Work

If you really need to boost your self-confidence fast, these self-confidence boosters might just work for you! Just pick one and do it whenever you need it, and keep them all in your arsenal for any time.

Visualize Success — When you visualize the thing you want to do ending successfully, including how it will work out, this is a great way to ensure success. For example, if you think of all the roadblocks that might get in your way and how you’ll overcome them, that will help you during the actual event.

Think about Past Successes — One way a person develops self-confidence is by knowing what success feels like. If you’ve had even small successes doing anything, think about those things. Find an image of something that most closely relates what you’re getting ready to do so that you can go through it in your mind and experience the feelings of success.

Remember Something Good — One way to give yourself self-confidence is to just think of a happy time from the past. Think of the time that you felt happiest, most self-confident, and ready to take on the world. You can find that person inside your mind and feel that way moving forward.

Listen to Uplifting Music — Before you embark on anything that needs self-confidence, turn up the music and get positive. Listening to your “fight” music beforehand is a great way to tune into yourself and feel good about what you’re doing.

Need More Self-Discipline?

Is self-discipline an area that you need to improve in? If so then hopefully the following tips and advice will help you get to grips with this skill which often challenges people!

Self-discipline is definitely something I am focused on at the moment! As someone who has recently started to undertake formal study again (for the Certificate in Assessing Vocational Achievement) I am having to be very self-disciplined.

Each day we have choices to make. Wake up early and do some early morning exercise, or get an extra hour of sleep? Pack a healthy lunch to take to work, or buy something at lunchtime? Throw a little extra money in your savings account, or buy that new gadget or pair of shoes you’ve been thinking about all month?

Deep down inside, we know which actions will yield the best results. Yet many of us struggle with making the best decisions. How do we overcome these challenges? Self-discipline is the answer.

Why Is Self-Discipline Important?

If you want to be successful and reach your goals, self-discipline is the most crucial skill to master. Frequently, the best choices aren’t the fastest, easiest, or most pleasant. So you must exercise a high level of control over your emotions and behaviour. Improving your ability to do what is best for you regardless of initial desire is the only way to make consistent progress in life. As such, if self-discipline is your foundational skill, you grow more effective in everything you do.

The Benefits Of Self-Discipline

When you develop a stronger sense of self-control, you can expect multiple improvements across many areas of your life. Here are just a few benefits of self-discipline.

1- Improved Health

First, improving your self-discipline leads to improved physical health. Exercising control over the quality and quantity of food you consume, establishing a regular fitness routine, and drinking enough water help you maintain a healthy weight, reduce your chances of illness and disease, and increase your chances of longevity and vitality later in life.

2- Greater Academic and Career Success

Next, self-discipline helps you make choices that can lead to higher academic and career success. Sometimes you must choose between studying longer hours and spending time out with friends, or staying late after work to complete a project and heading home to relax. Self-discipline helps you see the value of delayed gratification, which pays off down the line.

3- Better Relationships

Third, self-discipline improves your relationships because you become a person who follows through on your commitments. People in your life learn they can trust you to do what you say you will, and they view you more favorably.

4- Better Financial Health

Next, gaining better control over your finances is another direct benefit of self-discipline. While it’s more fun to spend money than it is to save, the disciplined individual sees the long-term benefit of putting money away for a rainy day. That’s not to say you pinch pennies and sacrifice quality of life. Self-discipline isn’t supposed to make you miserable. Instead, it’s about weighing the pros and cons and making decisions that bring you closer to your goals.

Examples of financial self-discipline that don’t require total restriction include regularly putting a certain percentage of each paycheck into your savings account or sticking to a budget that allocates a certain amount of money each month for discretionary spending. You still get to enjoy the present, though, not at the expense of your future.

5- Fewer Regrets

Another benefit of growing more self-disciplined is that you’ll have fewer regrets because you make better choices in the first place.

You’ll eliminate such problems as saying the wrong thing at the wrong time because you’re disciplined enough to think before speaking.

You’ll avoid jumping to conclusions, give yourself time to gather information before making decisions, and make choices based on facts rather than emotion or opinion.

6- Improved Time Management

With an ever-growing list of things vying for our attention, it seems that time is often in short supply. One of the best benefits of self-discipline is improved management of your time.

For example, social media can be the ultimate time-killer if you don’t exercise self-control. While it can be useful at times, you can easily fall into the trap of mindlessly scrolling through news feeds when you could be completing other tasks.

7- See Projects Through To The End

Finally, self-discipline helps you complete tasks and projects that you start, even when you lose steam or desire. Motivation is always high at the beginning of a new goal. Whether it’s a new diet plan, a new business idea, or even new relationships to a certain degree, when things are fresh, there is nothing but excitement and stimulation ahead.

Yet over time, motivation fades, challenges arise, reality sets in, and its tempting to go back to something more familiar or move on to the next shiny object.

Exercising self-control and choosing to finish what you start, within reason, even when you lose motivation and desire means you not only have the finished project under your belt, but you’ve learned lessons and acquired skills you wouldn’t have had you quit.

Conclusion

As the American writer, philosopher and artist, Elbert Hubbard once said, “Self-discipline is the ability to do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not.”

Understanding the importance of self-discipline, then taking steps to improve this most critical skill is perhaps the best thing you can do for your personal development and likelihood of lifetime success.

Be A Lifelong Learner

If you were to develop one skill to help you in all aspects of your life, what would it be?

Studies have shown that one of the best gifts you can give yourself is to become a lifelong learner. What exactly is a Lifelong Learner? A simple definition is that it is someone that “engages in the “ongoing, voluntary, and self-motivated” pursuit of knowledge for either personal or professional reasons.” Why should you be a Lifelong Learner? Because, quite simply, without learning, the mind stagnates.

Thankfully, becoming a lifelong learner isn’t hard. Below are ten easy ways to build a habit of learning that will serve you in years to come.

Commit

Unless you make lifelong learning a priority, you’re not going to do it. You start with committing to change and then go from there.

Create a Personalised Learning Environment

True learning results when you take charge of your learning environment. Sit down with your mentor and make concrete goals. Set up a system that enables you to learn and a setting in which you can learn. Once you have this, you are truly ready to begin.

Read

Read books, magazines, news articles, academic journals, and anything that catches your attention. If it’s interesting to you, then it’s worth perusing.

Keep a List

Have a question? Write it down. Come back to this list later and Google the answers. Let this become the jumping off point for learning new things.

Create

Create a project out of one of the things you find interesting. Set goals, give a timeline, and a final deadline to complete it. Invite others to take part in your project with you. You learn so much more when you collaborate. Create milestones and celebrate each one on your road to completion.

Socialise

Engage with and socialize with people who also enjoy learning. These will become your encouragers and mentors along the way.

Become a Mentor Yourself

We all have something we’re good at and could help others learn. Your particular skill set might be what someone else needs to succeed. By getting involved in mentoring, you find yourself not only cementing the knowledge you already have but learning new things as well.

Study with Others

When you work with a group, it’s generally easier to learn as you can draw upon the base of shared knowledge. That, in turn, helps you to discover new things yourself.

Seek out a Job that Encourages Lifelong Learning

The final step toward lifelong learning is to find work where you are encouraged to learn new things, and which continually challenges you.

Remember, building habits that lead to lifelong learning relies on repetition. Consciously engage in learning activities as often as possible, making them a part of every single day if you can, for optimal success.

Finding Your Best Time to Work

“The early bird gets the worm.” We’ve all heard the aphorism, but is it true? Are morning people more productive? In a word, no.

There really are early birds and late owls (and people in the middle), but there isn’t one way that’s “best”. Instead, the key to productivity is to understand your own circadian rhythms and schedule your day to take advantage of your most productive times. Here’s how.

Think About It

The fact is, you probably already know when your most productive time is. Spend a few minutes considering your average day and think about how you feel at each point. Do you find yourself springing out of bed, or do you need a few coffees?

Or do you get sleepy mid-afternoon, or are you just hitting your stride? Are you perhaps someone who falls asleep shortly after dinner, or do you get a rush of inspiration as the sun goes down and work furiously into the night? Jot down a quick graph of your daily energy ebbs and flows.

Keep a Journal

If reflecting on your usual day doesn’t help, try journaling for a few days. Once every hour, make a note of how you are feeling and what you are doing. After a few days, your usual daily rhythm should start to be clear.

Pay Attention to Mealtimes

The timing, quality and quantity of meals has a tremendous effect on how focused and productive we are. Some people feel sleepy after a large meal, while others can’t think if they are hungry.

While the basics of healthy eating are well known, each person’s response to food is highly individual. Scientists are working on tests that will let them prescribe the optimum diet for each person, but until then, paying attention to your body is the best tool we have. Chances are, you already know whether that bagel is going to fuel your day or send you into a stupor. If your goal is productivity, put that knowledge to use.

Scheduling Your Day for Productivity

Once you have a good idea of your best and worst times of day, as well as how food affects your productivity, it’s time to reschedule your day. If possible, change your work hours to fit your most productive times. If that’s not possible, try to schedule your most important work for your most alert times of day. Save your easy, repetitive work for the pre-noon hangry time or the 4PM slump.

If you know hunger affects you, stock up on healthy snacks for work. On the other hand, if big lunches make you sleepy, have a salad and chicken breast rather than the pasta. As you make changes in your schedule, keep notes on what works and what doesn’t. Before long, you’ll have optimized your day for productivity.

How to Move On When You Make a Mistake

If you are like most people, then you have probably lost quite a bit of sleep to ruminating on past mistakes. Everyone does that. They lay in their bed at night and just as they are about to sleep, they start dwelling on some mistake they made.

Sometimes the mistake was yesterday and sometimes the mistake was a decade ago. Thankfully, there are a lot of different strategies that you can try to make getting over a mistake a lot easier. In this article, you will find out a few different ways that you can get over mistakes, no matter how severe.

Look for Some Positives

No matter how severe a mistake is, there is a good chance that it may have some positive aspects to it. You have to try and look for a silver lining in any mistake and focus on that, instead of the negatives. A good example of this would be mistakes that cause you to learn something.

We all make mistakes, but we also all learn from our mistakes as well. Focus less on the mistake, and more on what you learned as a result of the mistake.

Look at the Mistake in Context

One thing about humans is that we tend to really overinflate the impact of mistakes in our mind. Sometimes it can be helpful to try and distance yourself from a mistake and ask yourself “did it really matter in the end?”

This happens a lot with social gaffes. People say the wrong thing to someone and assume that the other person was very offended by it and is thinking about it; however, the reality is often that the person has forgotten about the conversation entirely. So, it is worth distancing yourself from a mistake and asking if the mistake is really as bad as you are making it out to be.

Do Something to Make Amends

A big reason why so many people dwell on mistakes is that they don’t ever do anything to make up for the mistake. Making up for the mistake, if that’s possible, can really help you to stop dwelling on it.

Obviously, this doesn’t apply to every mistake, but if you can think of a way to try and repair the damage done by a mistake that you made, that will go a long way towards helping you to overcome the mistake and move on.