Investing in Your Personal Development

The rat race is a demanding and competitive way of life—a world where the strong survive and the weak perish. Though there’s plenty of opportunities to succeed, you have to prepare yourself and be well-equipped to grab every opportunity and use them to your advantage. And priming you up for success starts with improving yourself and investing in your personal development.

A big chunk of life is spent getting ready for success, so personal development should be no stranger to you. From your high school and college to your experiences and achievements, they all dictate how poised you are to accomplish your life’s goals. But growth doesn’t end with what you’ve already learned. Regardless of your life stage, there’s always room for self-improvement.

Where do you start?

The keyword here is ‘personal,’ so when it comes to your starting point, it all begins with you. Master your mind. Find your life purpose. Develop a strong mindset. Create a vision for yourself and act on your goals. When you focus on these aspects of yourself, you’ll soon discover that everything in your life falls into place in a seemingly effortless manner—career, home life, relationships, even your health. This doesn’t mean you’ll no longer face any obstacles or challenges, just that you’ll be better equipped to overcome them.

What are you trying to develop?

Basically, there are four areas of your life that you can choose to develop: the spiritual, the physical, the mental, and the emotional. Know what you want to build and understand the reason behind it. Ask yourself, why do you want to change? While learning in and of itself is worthwhile, you need to be clear about its purpose, so you can evaluate whether your self-improvement efforts are getting you closer to your goals. It can also be a great source of motivation when you have a clear vision of where you want to be standing at the end of the process.

How do you go about it?

Depending on the area/s you want to improve on, the first thing you must do is to create a personal development action plan. Identify goals, then outline the steps you need to take to achieve them. Here are some examples:

Getting Healthy

• Exercise for 30 minutes five days a week
• Eat vegetable dishes twice daily, cut down on carbs and meat
• Zero junk food
• Go to bed at 9 PM

Learning an instrument

• Get guitar lessons twice a week
• Practice three hours a day
• Learn a new song to play once a week

Let your action plan serve as your guide for what you want to accomplish with a timeline for achievements. It can be as flexible or rigid as you want it to be, write it down in a journal, as a checklist, or whatever format you’re comfortable with.

Do your research on the areas you want to develop about yourself so that you can consider possibilities, along with the hurdles you may face. Make a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) list for your self-evaluation. As you move forward with your personal development, make sure to revisit your plan from time to time to track your progress.

Tips from Resumeble for your personal development plan

• Find your motivation

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. To see your personal development through, you need to find your drive, discover your purpose and have a laser-focus on your objectives. It helps if you have a support system of like-minded people that can be your source of help and encouragement.

• Move forward with purpose

Take some time to evaluate and ensure the right reasons motivate your actions. Whatever you intend to happen becomes your reality. Make sure your goals and intentions are aligned because if they’re not, you can easily be derailed by excuses and distractions that can prevent your progress. Remember: If you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything.

• Start now

Don’t procrastinate about your development plan. Self-improvement takes time, so you need to start immediately. The sooner you begin, the faster and earlier you’ll achieve your goals.

• Take baby steps

Massive, complex undertakings can be made less complicated by breaking them down into small, easier-to-manage steps. Conquering bite-sized tasks will not only foster the confidence in the realization of the overall goal but also nurture the motivation needed to get there.

• Find a mentor

Experience is a great teacher, but it doesn’t have to be your own. Finding the right mentor can be difficult, but if you can pull it off, you can cut years off your learning. Enlist your heroes as mentors. Read as many books as you can about them. Acknowledge all the things about them that you want to become. Learn from both their successes and mistakes. Discover the choices and sacrifices they endured to become who they are.

• Embrace change

As you move closer toward your personal development goals, you may discover your priorities have changed. Few people can say they’re exactly the same person from months, years, or decades ago, so your priorities WILL change, and that’s okay. It’s also perfectly fine to adjust your goals to accommodate your shifting priorities. What matters is that your personal development efforts continue to take you where you want to go. Review your efforts regularly and revise them as needed to ensure they remain relevant and aligned with your goals and priorities.

• Hold yourself accountable

Your personal development begins and ends with you, and you alone are responsible for your progress and success. If you don’t work toward your goals, no one else will. This also means that you have no one else to hold accountable once the results of your efforts have reached fruition. If you succeed, it’s all on you. The same goes for when you fail.

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