How come we think we don’t have to carry on our personal development once we have stopped our formal education?
Is it because we equate learning and growth with the educational asylums institutions we attended in our early years. Are we just ‘done’ with learning by the time we reach adulthood?
Naturally, you keep acquiring knowledge throughout your lives (some useful, some a complete waste of time), and you of course learn new skills and attributes throughout your working lives and all the roles you have played.
If you get to the point (or already have) of thinking that you no longer need to learn, you’re showing how closed your mind is, and how entrenched in your attitudes you are.
The ‘I’know it all’ approach to life doesn’t allow for change, and doesn’t allow for growth. To be a fully rounded and healthy person, is it not necessary to be able to respond to changes in your lives, in your environments and in your heart and mind?
No-one is perfect, and no-one knows everything there is to know. As the saying goes ‘there is always someone smarter than you’. Thankfully you don’t need to know everything, but it’s pretty useful to know when you need to learn something, and when you need to develop new skills and abilities.
Goal Setting Works
Generally speaking, it helps to have a goal or two in mind towards your personal development, and to have the right sort of attitude.
Many people start with the ‘I can’t do that’ approach to goal setting. They focus on their limits rather than focussing on the solution or end result. Your energy should be directed to working out exactly what it is we need to do better and how.
Confidence is everything really, and confidence in your ability to learn and improve will make an amazing difference to your success.
If you are convinced that you can’t learn something, then you have already lost the battle. If you can tell yourself that if other people can do it, then so can you, this is a sign that you are on the way to success.
Once you have given yourself permission to be confident about your abilities, and to hold your head high with others, you can really work on the aspirations for improvement.
Make sure you aim high enough
Low level goals are too easy, and don’t test your abilities sufficiently. Aiming too high means you are less likely to meet your target – so maybe you need to set goals that divide up the big task and deal with these one at a time. It is important to make a realistic assessment about how you are going to achieve your goals.
Once you know what you are aiming for, you need to make a sensible plan of how you are going to get there.
Plans are essential
Plans allocate time for certain tasks, and break tasks down into manageable proportions. Plans enable you to make the best use of your time, and to develop the skills required to get things done.
It is important to be goal oriented. It is all very well reading up on something, but you need to put theory into practice. For many people, it’s a matter of lots of talk, but not so much action.
With everything you do, try and ensure there is a measurable outcome that you can identify as a target, and can be seen to be done.
Don’t let obstacles get in your way. When things get difficult, it’s important that you don’t give up. If we never have to overcome problems on our way, we would find life to be an easy ride. The test is how you overcome problems on the road to achievement and success.
If you consider some of the most successful people in the world today, you will find many of them have had more than one career, and many of them have experienced failure in the first degree and continued on to great future success. This reflects their self belief and determination.
So when things go wrong, learn from your mistakes and the mistakes of others. Never think you know best all the time, and acknowledge that sometimes you do. You should always think it possible to learn something new.
There are various stages in the path to self development. First, you need to take stock of yourself, your life and your dreams. If you don’t have any dreams, or visions of the future, then you need to spend some time working out where you are going in your life, and whether you should be changing anything.
You need to consider carefully whether your attitudes, feelings and beliefs, your behavior and your actions, are quite what you want them to be. Are they going to hinder or help you achieve your goals and desires? Or do you need to take steps to retrain yourself in certain ways, and work towards a healthier, better life management plan?
Self confidence, self belief, a certain amount of modesty, a positive attitude and a serious commitment are all essential elements to self development. Self development involves work, but it is work that will enable you to live your life fully, and give you the satisfaction of making not only your own dreams come true, but helping others to do so too.
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