Personal development is no doubt, a lifelong process. It serves as a way for people to assess their qualities and skills, give consideration to their aims in life and set goals in order to realize and maximize their potentials (Skills You Need, 2018). As life progresses, you are guaranteed to face a variety of circumstances, changing environments, and new roles that require you to adapt to them. A personal development plan will help you to handle the pressures that come with the continuous changes and challenges, so that you are well-equipped to excel in all the areas in your life. Personal development is an ongoing process of self-improvement either in your career, in your education, in your personal life, or in all of these areas. It is about setting goals for yourself and putting plans in place to reach those goals (Nyatyowa, 2017).
It is very sacrosanct that you consider personal development or training a priority in your life. Here are some insightful reasons to make you very serious with personal training:
It forces you out of your comfort zone. If there are areas of your job that you do not like, or are not good at, those are the weaknesses that a personal development plan can help you improve on. Confronting these areas and improving on them can help to push you out of your comfort zone. This allows you to experience growth and to improve your skills (Nyatyowa, 2017).
It develops your strength. A personal development plan not only helps you to improve on your weaknesses, but it can also help you to develop your strengths. By taking time to focus on nurturing and using your strengths more, you go from being good at something to being excellent at it. You can reach your potential and achieve great growth by developing the skills you are already good at (Nyatyowa, 2017).
It boosts your confidence. Making the decision to improve on your skills takes you a step closer to feeling more confident. Once you have achieved a certain goal, gained another skill, or developed a certain area of your life, you naturally feel good about yourself. The more you keep on developing in the areas of your life you are not confident in, the more you can boost your confidence.
It improves your self-awareness. Personal development is closely linked to self-awareness. It gives you the opportunity to take an honest look at the areas of your life that need improvement. Through this process, you get to know who you really are, what your true values are, and where you would like to go in life. Once you go through this process, you will improve your self-awareness and experience fulfillment (Nyatyowa, 2017).
There are many advantages you stand to gain if you can keep working on yourself. A foremost benefit is that it gives you a sense of direction. It gives you a clear sense of direction. Once you’ve raised your self-awareness, you are clearer on the things you wish to achieve from your life. Hence, decision-making becomes a lot easier. Tasks which used to consume a lot of your time without adding value to your life will no longer make it to your to-do list. Since they do not move towards your goals and visions, you easily drop them and ease your journey in life (CPP, 2018). The gimmick is that you shrink your life when you overburden yourself with needless loads. When goals are rightly set, they reduce your workload and subsequently increase the quality of every other thing you have done.
In the same vein, personal training and development improves your effectiveness and focus. When you subject yourself to personal development, every issue of your life becomes clearer. Without deceiving you, even with an improved sense of directions, your attention will still be fighting for multiple tasks simultaneously. As you keep on with your personal development, you can downplay the place of prioritization at your own detriment. Since your objectives are now clearer, you should carefully identify those tasks that need to be attended to first before others. All that I’ve been trying to explain is that, you should know how to play to your strengths instead of persistent struggle with your weaknesses. Once you allow yourself to be distracted, that marks the end to your personal development. When you are disciplined and committed to your personal development goals, you remain focused and unmoved (CPP, 2018).
This article will be incomplete without sharing some useful nuggets how to work out your personal development. You can improve your personal development by:
Self-acceptance: Self-acceptance is surely an enviable virtue. Accepting that you deserve to change is the first step of developing yourself. Learn from every of your past experiences. In everything that befalls, there is surely a lesson you need to learn and uphold from such. To truly witness a forward movement in life, you must learn how to take responsibility of everything that happens to you in life (Opportunity Desk, 2018).
Set realistic short term goals: The goals you set for yourself must be smart (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound). Never push yourself beyond the realities and what you have power to bear per time. The best and realistic way to set achievable goals is to focus on one per time and then move forward after that. For instance, if you want to digest 10 books on your subject matter in a year, you can easily start with a book per month. If this is done carefully, within the space of 10 months, you’re done reading the whole of the ten.
Know yourself. I so much like the sayings of foremost English playwright and poet, William Shakespeare in Hamlet that “above all, man, to thyself be true.” If you really pant for greatness in life, then you must first establish the kind of personality you carry about. When you know yourself, you will easily know the areas you need to improve on. Socrates succinctly puts it thus: “an unexamined life is not worth living.” Until you know your true identity, progress will always elude you (Opportunity Desk, 2018).
References
CPP (2018). Core Benefits of Personal Development. Retrieved from https://www.coachingpositiveperformance.com/6-core-benefits-personal-development/
Nyatyowa, L (2017). 4 Reasons Why Personal Development Should Be A Priority. Retrieved from https://www.oxbridgeacademy.edu.za/blog/4-reasons-personal-development-priority/
Opportunity Desk (2018). 10 Tips for Achieving Personal Development. Retrieved from http://www.opportunitydesk.org/2018/03/06/10-tips-for-personal-development/
Skills You Need (2018). What is Personal Development? Retrieved from https://www.skillsyouneed.com/ps/personal-development.html
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