Q: What is personal development?
A: Everything we do to improve ourselves. Personal development affects everything, who we are, what we accomplish, how much we earn, our health, our entire quality of life. It involves these areas:
- Philosophies/attitudes/beliefs
- Habits
- Skills
- Knowledge
- Relationships
Q: How do you do it?
A. Five ways:
- Learning: (What you read and listen to, trainings/seminars/conference calls)
- Activities: (Practicing; trial and error)
- Modeling: (Your associations–who you spend time with)
- Mentoring: (Advice from others)
- Teaching: (Helping others, training/speaking)
Q: How do you start?
A: Do this:
(1) Make a commitment to learning.
Schedule thirty minutes a day for reading, listening to training. Think about what you are learning. Take notes. Write down questions.
Your learned knowledge will affect your activities. You’ll see improvement in your performance and results. Similarly, your activities will affect your learned knowledge by providing feedback and context.
And so it goes–learned knowledge, followed by activity knowledge, followed by more learned knowledge. One builds upon the other; neither is as valuable by itself.
(2) Examine your Associations.
We tend to be the average of the five people we associate with the most: income, attitudes, life style, habits, everything. You are influenced by the people you spend time with. Who are they? What kind of people are they? What are their philosophies? Habits? Do they have the life you want?
As you become aware of your associations, you might see some people you want to spend less time with, or even disassociate from completely. There might be others you want to spend more time. As your associations change, your environment will change, and, over time, so will you.
The “Law of Attraction†says that “like attracts like.†You don’t attract what you want in life, you attract what you are. And so if you want to change your life, you must first change yourself, and you do that through personal development.
