Professional Development Archives - Page 2 of 20

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.

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.

Being Mindful You Are Always Learning

We have all heard that experience is a great teacher. Each day of our lives is packed with numerous experiences. Many of these experiences are everyday occurrences such as walking the dog or doing the washing up after dinner. Others are less common. Occasionally, some are so unique that they are literally life changing. However, whether the experience is mundane or out of this world, it offers us a learning moment.

Most of us will, hopefully, come away from a unique experience with a fresh perspective. Yet, few of us grasp the learning opportunity that is present in the day-today activities that, by necessity, take up the majority of our time. Buddhists call this awareness of the learning potential in the commonplace “mindfulness.”

When you begin to be mindful, you see that everything that you do has merit. You start to realise that no matter what you are doing, you can do it better. In our working lives and in our personal interactions, this means that we begin to pay closer attention to every task. You understand that each task fits into others and together they comprise the whole of your activity. If you take a shortcut or cut corners on the smallest of things it only serves to undermine the largest and seemingly most important things.

Likewise, when you attempt to do the most basic of jobs to the very best of your ability this mindful mindset carries over into other areas and brings a new awareness and sense of achievement.

So, use every experience, every day, as a moment to learn. Be mindful of bad or lazy behaviours and work to change them into more positive and productive actions. If you recognise that you are always learning then you will find real benefit from being aware of what you are learning and using that learning.

In Search Of Optimism

It’s been a beautiful afternoon here in Cheshire which gave me the chance to sit outside reading and writing. I don’t know about you but I always find that the sun and a little warmth makes me feel more positive/optimistic. That set me thinking about other ways to make ourselves feel more optimistic and there’s some thoughts from my pondering sat outside!

Ask Yourself Three Key Questions

A big difference between pessimists and optimists is that optimists tend to think that:

Problems are temporary and can be resolved
Problems are particular to a certain event/person/experience and are not related to everything
Problems are external and not a reflection of who you are

On the other hand, pessimists often think that problems are permanent, related to everything, and internal (caused by their own qualities).

To help stop yourself from negative, pessimistic thinking, ask these three questions:

Is this problem really permanent, or is it just temporary?
Is this thing really a universal truth, or is it a problem particular to one moment/event?
Am I blaming myself for everything, or is there more than one facet to the situation?

Practice Gratitude

Studies show that actively practising gratitude can boost optimism and happiness. Resolve to spend two minutes a day jotting down one or two things that you are grateful for.

Surround Yourself with Positive People

Emotions are contagious. Surround yourself with negative people, and it’s easy to sink into a bad mood. Surround yourself with optimistic people, and you just might see yourself looking on the sunny side of the street.

Search for the Positive

When adversity strikes, try to see a positive side of the event. The idea is not to deny the reality of bad situations, but to help you cope with them more productively. For instance, if you get laid off, you could be angry at yourself and the bad job you did, or you could focus on practical steps to land a new, better job.

Practice Mindfulness

A 2014 study showed that people who practiced mindfulness had fewer negative thoughts than before they started practicing, but the same number of positive thoughts. Practicing mindfulness can be as simple as sitting quietly for two minutes a day and paying attention to your breath.

Be Kind To Yourself

Over the past few weeks I have been sharing some ideas on Twitter around how to Be Kind to Yourself. One of the things that has led me to reflect on is how sometimes we need to change our routines to help us be kind to ourselves. It’s a really good idea to establish routines. However, sometimes a routine can become a rut. If you are feeling unfulfilled, tired, and maybe even a little bit overwhelmed, you probably need to find a way to break your everyday routine.

Here are nine ways to get out of a rut. If you already do one of them, try to figure out a way that you can make it different in some way.

Take a New Path to Work

This might seem silly, especially if you were driving or walking the same way to work every single day. However, something as simple as making a new path to work can totally change your life. Look back on your life and think about the random things that you have done that you put you in just the right place at the right time. What if you happen to meet someone new just because you took a different path than normal?

Try Cooking a Totally New Meal

Even something as simple as your everyday meals can become routine. Most people tend to eat the same things day after day, month after month, switching between eight to ten basic meals. If you look at how you eat, you’ll probably discover the same thing. This is a good way to explore different cultures and learn new things. You might even want to take a cooking class – more on that below.

Sign Up for a Class

To really break up your normal schedule, sign up for a class in something that you think you’re interested in. For example, if you love reading about medieval times, perhaps you should study medieval times in school. Thankfully, today you don’t have to sign up for every single class to go back to school. Instead, you can find a class online that will work just as well.

Walk Instead of Ride

If you normally ride to work but it’s within walking distance, you might want to try walking. When you walk places, you’re more likely to meet other people who are walking places. Plus, you get a lot of exercise, sun and time to think.

Take the Stairs

if you work in an office building or go places and you normally take the elevator, try taking the stairs. See how different that makes you feel. It may seem strange, but the smallest change in your day can make the biggest difference. Maybe by taking the stairs, you’ll lose five pounds this year; who knows?

Introduce Yourself

Often, it’s easy to get tied up in our own lives. We get so busy with our family and the friends that we already know that we forget that there’s a lot of people out there that might be the best friend we ever had in our lives and we just haven’t met them yet. Start introducing yourself to at least one new person every day. It doesn’t matter if they’re a stranger on the street in a store or at work; put out your hand and introduce yourself.

Try a New Colour

Another way that you can change up your day and break your everyday routine is to try new fashions or new decorations. It’s surprising what a new coat of paint on your office wall or your living room wall can do for your mood and your outlook.

Find Top 10 Things to Do in Your Area

A fun way to get out of your normal routine is to do something new right in the area that you live. Many of us live in places that other people pay good money to visit on vacation. Find out the different things that vacationers do in your town and follow what they do.

Listen to Books

The truth is, the more you read, the smarter you’re going to become. But it can be difficult to find time to read. Thankfully you can listen to digital books too. You can get a subscription to Audible and listen to as many books as you want. The more you listen to books, the smarter you’re going to become and the more likely you will be to discover your passion.

Discovering your passion requires that you are willing to break out of your comfort zone and change your routine from what it is now. You might want to start with a few of the small tasks mentioned in this article. You will surprise yourself at where you’re going to end up when you start changing your everyday routine.