Personal Development

If you are taking the time to read these words you are already on the right track! Wherever you are, whoever you are, whenever you are looking for personal growth, you are at a point from which you can make a start or take a step forward. Now is the best moment to assess your skills and qualities, consider your aims in life and set goals in order to realize and maximize your potential. Early life development and early formative experiences within the family and school help to shape us as adults, but personal development should not stop there.  

There is no better day than today for a new beginning

Although your personal development isn’t like a race where you have a start and a finish line. It’s a lifelong process for you to be as happy as you can be. What we are talking about here is a cyclical process of transformation which takes place every single day throughout one’s life. So the present moment is a given gift to add momentum to this cycle. This concept though, looks very abstract (and it is indeed), but let me pose here a question: have you ever wondered why people from the most diverse backgrounds, ethnic groups, religions and societies speak about happiness as their final purpose? 

Nothing is as important as happiness

From my point of view, everything else is in service to this very goal. Not necessarily more or less important, but within it. Let’s leave this topic for other articles now. I just wanted to make the point that personal development has happiness as its purpose. Since this is the most important thing we need in our life whoever we are, it is really worthwhile to focus on our personal development.  

This blog may help you to identify some of the skills you need to set life goals which can enhance your employability, raise your self-confidence and lead to a more fulfilling, higher quality life.  If you plan to make relevant, positive and effective life choices for your future, you will empower yourself. 

Personal Development Plan

Personal development involves mental, physical, emotional and spiritual skills. You can work on each of them independently in order to cultivate them in our mind, body, emotions and spirit. However, they are all interconnected in such a way that the achievements you’ll attain in one will have a positive impact in each of the others and vice versa.

If you have this motivation to improve yourself and start a PDP (Personal Development Plan), you may be thinking: ‘how can I get started on my own journey of personal growth?’ Or if you have already started to consciously pursue personal development, you may be thinking, ‘how can I get to the next level?’

There are so many ways of doing it. You could even create your own way. Actually, that would be ideal, as we are talking of a development that is individual and unique. No two PDPs are the same. In fact, there are potentially billions of them, as many as human beings in the world. Nevertheless, we can follow certain patterns that will allow us to get straight to the point. This can be as simple as making a list of goals. So the very first step would be to answer these questions: who do I want to be? What do I want? What experience do I want in my life? How do I want to grow? How do I want to contribute to the world? 

Be specific

Once you set your aims, be careful! Don’t confuse goals with strategies. Being happy could be a goal but we need to describe our goals in more detail. If what are to achieve our aims, it is crucial that we focus on the strategies. The more specific a strategy is the easier it is to reach what we want and that would be a boost for our next task. This means that once we answer the previous questions (and write them down), we need to reply the following ones: how can I become the person I want to be? How and when can I get what I want? What resources do I need? 

In following articles I’ll be revealing my personal answer to these questions. What about you?