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What is Personal Development?
Personal development is a process that you will work on for your entire life. The purpose of personal development is to help you with all aspects of your life and help you become more self-aware at home and at work.
It will help you assess your skills, qualities, and will help you build the lifestyle and life that you envision that you desire for happiness and a high quality of life.
From Wikipedia:
- Personal development covers activities that improve awareness and identity, develop talents and potential, build human capital and facilitate employability, enhance the quality of life and contribute to the realisation of dreams and aspirations. Personal development takes place over the course of a person’s entire life. Not limited to self-help, the concept involves formal and informal activities for developing others in roles such as teacher, guide, counsellor, manager, life coach or mentor. When personal development takes place in the context of institutions, it refers to the methods, programs, tools, techniques, and assessment systems that support human development at the individual level in organisations.
Perform a SWOT on Your Life
A well-designed personal development plan will address your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats in all areas of your life that you develop. Your plan will identify your strengths so that you can improve them, your weaknesses are so that you can make up for them and new opportunities, so you know when a door (or window) is open, as well as noting any obstacles along the way.
From the Skills You Need website:
A quick summary of SWOT analysis 
- SWOT analysis is a way of looking at your situation by identifying:
- Strengths, or those areas where you have an advantage over others, or some unique resources to exploit;
- Weaknesses, or areas where you or your organisation may be weaker than others, and may find that others can do better than you;
- Opportunities, or possibilities that you can take advantage of to help you achieve your goals and ambitions; and
- Threats, or things that may prevent you or your organisation from making a profit or achieving your goals.
Recognise Development Areas
When you perform your SWOT in each area of your life, you will discover internal and external things that are blocking your success. For example, you may hold the belief you’ll never have enough money to save for the future. Because of that, when you do get “extra” money, you tend to blow it right away on all the things you feel you missed out on before.
This is a limiting belief about money that a lot of people have because most people think money is a finite resource when it’s not. It’s man made. Therefore, we can make more.
It’s important to uncover and recognise other limiting beliefs as they can impact your life in a negative way.
Identify Your Resources
You may do some work that helps you look at the resource you have available to do a specific task. For example, if you decide you want to start a coaching business, what resources do you have to start it. What things do you need, what things can you live without, what can you do yourself, what does someone else need to do. This works in every single aspect of your life. You may realise you already have all the skills inside to do exactly what you wanted to do. However, you may realise that you need to pay for additional brainpower (resources).
Build Better Relationships
One of the most surprising aspects of creating a self-development plan is how much it can help relationships. When you realise that you only control your own behaviour and actions, it starts to get easier to manage relationships.
Treating them how you want to be treated is an excellent start but becoming self-aware enough to go farther and realise that not everyone likes what you like so you may need to treat someone the way they like to be treated instead.
It is also quite freeing to understand that each person is responsible for themselves and their own actions. Therefore it is pointless to try to change someone’s behaviour or to feel embarrassment at the way they behave. Bad behaviour makes that person look bad, not you.
The trouble is we are brought up to believe that we are responsible for the behaviour of others, that it reflects upon us in some way. However once we know the truth it is easier to shrug it off as not your concern.
Other Uses
Whatever you want to work on can be done within the personal development plan. Whether you want to lose weight, start a business, change jobs, or go back to school – the goal doesn’t matter as much as developing the plan that you need to get where you want to go. Your plan will not be the same as anyone else’s because you are different. That’s why it’s so consequential and unique because it’s just for you.
Dreams
Do you have dreams of a better life or did you have dreams that got put aside? Don’t YOU deserve to have your dreams fulfilled instead of always helping others to reach for theirs?
The purpose of Personal Development is to help you move forwards in your life.
Have you hankered to go on stage and speak, have an audience held enthralled by the power of your words or wanted to write a book that changed lives? Whatever your dream, big or small it is something to work towards. So many people are afraid to try in case they fail. What is failure though, a way not to do something, just another stepping stone towards success.
People don’t regret the things they did in later life, they regret the things they never tried to do. You have the power within you. It’s been there all along.
Find YOUR Dream
It doesn’t matter if you achieve a dream and find its not what you want. You reached that goal and then make a new one. You have found something you don’t want and often, in doing so, discover it was someone else’s dream that you took on board.
As children we are sponges soaking up information from those around us. Therefore its not hard to imagine that we can take on board the unrealised dreams of family members.
Lets face it, it’s not unknown for parents to push their children in the direction of dreams they wanted to achieve. Trying to live vicariously through them, not realising they are doing the same to their children, as they had done to them.
Encourage your children to follow their dreams by leading the way. There is no better role model than a parent who, whatever their age, decide to improve their life and grow exponentially into the life they should be living!
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