Archive for category Personal Development

The Beginner’s Guide To Personal Development

Posted by in Personal Development on September 9, 2011

By Donnie Jones

Life without growth is dull. Personal development is what steers this growth. It permits us to build a better quality of life emotionally, physically, and mentally. As human beings, we want to try interesting things, and have unique experiences. However as John Maxwell once said, “It isn’t experiences alone, it’s utilized experiences that produce the learning.” The secret to success is usually to discover how to implement our experiences, and use the lessons to improve us for the better. Personal development is not hard. It can be produced in three clear steps:

1. Build Better Habits

Habits are regarded by many people as the biggest influencers of personal development. Habits are patterns of actions that transform into a routine through time. And as far as routines go, they effect our daily activities. Since developing habits is one of the most important components of personal development, it is important that we create a conscious effort to develop them. Upon knowing the good and bad habits that we have, we must always try our level best to further increase and improve the good habits, and associate substantial amounts of discomfort and pain towards the undesirable habits. While it’s less difficult said than done, the gains are too amazing to dismiss. Just imagine being able to quit smoking, start working out, become wealthier, spend more time with family, and more! The key element in continually creating good habits is self-discipline. Habits ought to be developed so they can eventually become long-lasting permanent changes, instead of quick temporary fixes.

2. Make Plenty of Mistakes, and Learn From Them

All people from Presidents to small children have something in common. That’s the ability to make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with making mistakes, it’s the latter mental state that we should be careful of. It is important that we don’t let our mistakes weigh us down. Instead, we’ve got to learn to forgive ourselves, and ask for forgiveness if need be. What’s crucial is that we learn from our mistakes, and not continue to repeat them. While not all mistakes are completely correctable, it’s never too late to bounce back. There’s really no point in feeling sorry for ourselves and loathing in self-pity. That does nothing. Life is too short to let mistakes weigh us down. There’s so much to live for! Instead, learn from mistakes, and move on!

3. Focus On Ongoing Growth And Change

We must focus on ongoing growth and change. One of the easiest ways to do this is by understanding the experiences we encounter. We may not recognize it, but we face various experiences just about every single day. Of course, some experiences are not so thrilling as others. Yet, it’s our responsibility to learn from our experiences, and always figure out ways to become better. There needs to be some type of “internal check”, which allows us to evaluate ourselves. With proper guidance and discernment, we’ll make progress on improving our personal growth.

Personal development can come in multiple forms. While performing these steps aren’t exactly simple, these are methods that will allow you to grow as a person in all areas of your life. Properly following these three steps will allow you to succeed in your career, attitude, relationships, finances, and more.

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Personal Development Reprogramming

Posted by in Personal Development on September 9, 2011

By Steven Handel

“The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.” — William James

When I first started getting interested in personal development (over half a decade ago), I quickly found that I had more control over my mind and thoughts than I originally believed.

Before I knew anything, I actually had no idea that our minds could be reprogrammed and modified to better serve our needs.

Instead, I used to just believe: “this is the brain I have, and this is the brain I will always have.” It was a passive thing – something I had no control over. It just was.

But the more I learned about personal development, the more I learned our mind is actually very flexible and very capable of changing itself.

In fact, our mind is always changing. Every new experience we have, and every new thing we learn, changes the neural pathways and structures in our brain. Today, scientists call it “neuroplasticity.”

The key to personal development is to actively change the structure of our brains by conditioning and reprogramming our mind in new ways. And we can actually achieve this using a variety of different strategies. Here are some things you can start working on right away:

Change your perspective. Try having more solution-oriented thinking instead of problem-oriented thinking. When you think only about the stuff that sucks in your life, it’ll often make you feel worse. But when you start feeling capable of finding solutions and overcoming obstacles, you condition your mind to find the answers you need.

Modify your self-talk. We all talk to ourselves inside our heads – that’s what thinking is. The problem is some of us talk negatively about ourselves, while others talk positively about themselves. The more you tell yourself something, the more likely you are to believe it and act on that belief. So the more you feed yourself healthy and motivating thoughts, the more those thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes can have a positive effect on your life.

Take risks. Sometimes the best way to learn something is to step outside of our heads and experience it. You might be used to getting a cheeseburger at every restaurant you go, but until you take a risk and try something new you’ll never know what else life might have to offer. Will you fail and make mistakes sometimes? Sure, but it’s a part of the growing process.

Use your imagination as practice. Studies show that imagining yourself taking a course of action is a really good way to motivate yourself to take that action in the future. So by practicing visualization techniques on a regular basis we can actually reprogram our thoughts and behaviors. One great example of this is professional athletes mentally rehearsing before a game or match.

Stop victimizing yourself. One of the most common traps our culture teaches us is that we are helpless victims of circumstance. In other words, we have no control over our destiny; instead, reality rears its ugly head and we get whatever we get. As a result, we become programmed to shift blame to external factors and never seek responsibility for our lives.

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Personal Development Is For Life

Posted by in Personal Development on September 9, 2011

By Willie Horton

You chose the clothes that you’re wearing right now. Last time you ate or snacked, you chose what to eat. You chose the car you’re driving and where you live. You choose whether or not to look after your health and fitness and to exercise. In fact, as you look at your life right now, every single thing that you see is as a result of the choices that you’ve made. Some find this revelation distasteful because many people complain about their lives, how they hate their job, how they wish things were different, because people don’t like to realize that they are responsible. No one else is responsible for the state of your life. If you want to change it, you’re the one who has to take action. And like everything else you’ve chosen for yourself and your life up to now, you could always make the big decision and chose to embark on your own journey of personal development. But be warned, whilst the benefits are transformative, it’s a journey that you shouldn’t take lightly.

Unfortunately, much of the conventional wisdom out there would have you believe that personal development is easy, quick and painless and something about which you make a once in a lifetime choice – as in ‘I’ve read a book and now I understand’ or ‘I’ve done a course that has changed my life’. Life is not that simple. In particular, life is complicated by the fact that the way we’re hard-wired will always leave the subconscious mind yearning for a return to the simple, mundane, ordinary, not-too-bad life. This is a psychological fact. In fact, there are very few people indeed for whom life changes in a startling flash of self realization or enlightenment. And I’m beginning to come to the conclusion that you almost need to hit rock bottom to find yourself in this wonderful position. Thankfully – or maybe we actually need it – very few of us hit rock bottom. The result is that we’ve never come across a big enough catalyst to wake up!

And, until you wake up and open your eyes and your mind, you’ll never experience the kind of insight that will change your life. For most ordinary people life is ordinary, with its challenges, worries, ups and downs. We don’t become desperate enough to take a once and for all leap into the unknown because our known is not so bad. Consequently, we trudge along from day to day in the fog created by our subconscious mind’s obsession with our formative years. If you want to transform this routine half-life, you’re going to have to get used to taking action – real action – every single day. Actually, the action that’s required is a moment-to-moment thing. Of course, you trudge through life out of choice and each thing you do or don’t do moment-to-moment is the result of choice also. Sadly, your subconscious mind makes this routine decisions for you. It does it automatically and it does it out of a longing for things to be just the way they’ve always been – mundane and routine. And, as a result, we short-change ourselves, going through life without realizing that we’re missing it.

But, if you’ve arrived at the point of restlessness or mild dissatisfaction that you simply cannot shake, then you will have browsed personal development websites, you might have read a couple of books, you will have arrived at reading this article. And you will have come across all kinds of advice from all kinds of people, from those that would have you believe that if you get that new car, condo or yacht, your life will be different, to those that will tell you that, to get what you want out of life, all you have to do is believe and leave the rest to universal energy. Sure enough, universal energy is responsive to our input – physics has confirmed that energy is responsive – even to observation! – and that it is in constant communication. But this responsive universe exists moment to moment, in the same way that life must be lived moment to moment. And that presents most of us with a big challenge – you have to choose to be present and engaged, moment to moment.

The point that I’m making is that personal development is a moment-to-moment thing. If you do really and truly want to change your life the changes are derived from the small changes that you make moment to moment. That means commitment, vigilance and the perseverance to pick yourself up and start over each and every time that you falter. A client once asked my ‘Does that mean that if I falter forty times today, I have to pick myself up and start over forty one times?’ The simple answer is yes. And that is why the steps that you take need to become part and parcel of who you are and what you do moment to moment.

In other words, you’ve got to find opportunities (or create them) to be focused during the course of the day. Otherwise, you subconscious mind will, of its own volition, focus on the ‘stored knowledge’ that has got you into the rut that your life is in. This means that, for example, even those who meditate to focus their mind first thing in the morning but don’t take steps to maintain their focus during the day will inevitably falter and, perhaps, never realize that it’s during the cut and thrust of the normal day that you need your focus most. And that will only lead to frustration, disillusionment and the conclusion that this personal development thing was of no benefit in the first place.

But it is. It is life-changing. It is transformative. And the amazing thing is that it is all these things as a result of tiny, apparently insignificant, steps that you take moment-to-moment. Like, for example, choosing to brush your teeth in a non-routine way, choosing to break with routine and have something completely different for dinner or, indeed, something as ridiculously simple as choosing to sit in a non-routine place to eat that dinner. You see, by breaking down the small routine in our lives, our minds become attuned to the ease with which routine can be broken. Once you break up your small routine by doing little things differently, you begin to dismantle the very fabric of your repetitive life. When you do this everything changes – you open yourself up to a world of unlimited possibilities – the real world. Remember, however, if you’re not the kind of person who can commit, if perseverance if too much of an effort for you – then this is not an option.

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