8 Best Practices for Starting Your Personal Development Journey
When first starting your personal development journey, it can be really tempting to take short cuts.
You think that you already know who you are, what you want in life, what you stand for and how to exemplify that.
However, that’s not how the human mind works. Often we hide truths and are not totally honest with ourselves about these issues. Listed below, the following tips encourage you to follow these best practices when commencing your personal development journey. They will help you succeed…
#1. Do the SWOT
It’s of primary importance that you perform analysis on yourself. This covers every aspect of your life to find out what strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats you face for any of the target issues you want to address.
For example, if you perform a SWOT and realise that you’re not very good at something, you then have a choice. You can find someone who is that can do it for you, or you can find the specific training to learn to do it by yourself.
#2. Nurture Your Strengths
When you perform the SWOT for any sector of your life, you’ll also identify your strengths.
The best thing to do in life is to choose to lead with your strengths. You want to keep doing the things you’re strong at and learn to do them even better since you’re obviously interested in those things.
#3. Improve Your Weaknesses
When you find out that you are weak in some area, you’ll need to determine whether you should improve it yourself or improve it by outsourcing it.
To determine which is better, ask yourself whether it really matters who does it or just that it just needs to get done.
#4. Understand The 3 Domains of Personal Development
They are physical, cognitive and social-emotional. Together these domains cover all aspects of your life, including health, work, personal growth, spiritual life and so forth.
Working on all aspects of your life usually is much better than focusing only on one, as they are sometimes indistinguishable.
#5. Plan for Action
As you work through crafting your plan, nothing is done until you’ve set up action-packed steps, put them in your calendar or personal development planner and are scheduled for you to implement them.
Whether you are doing it yourself, or outsourcing it, DOING is the most critical part of the plan.
#6. Focus on The Right Target Issue First
One reason it’s helpful to go through every single domain and issue you have before setting up a plan is that it helps you to know which issue to focus on first.
For example, you cannot write a novel until you can read. Likewise, you can’t learn to write until you can read, so first things first. Create a list of goals to aim for and work through them all one by one. Start with the most important goal that needs to be achieved first and work your way through the list accordingly. This will give you the necessary focus.
#7. Be Persistent
Once you have your action plan, which is developed based on reality and not on how you wish it to be, you only now need to be persistent and take the steps to success. It truly is that easy.
Once you have the steps scheduled in your calendar or planner and you start implementing them, your life will begin to change.
#8. Get a Coach
If you understand everything but your implementation skills leave something more to be desired, you may want to employ a life coach to help you. If you know some life coaches who specialise in personal development, you might want to talk to them.
If you don’t know anyone, ask for recommendations or maybe do a search online. It’s likely you will find someone who would know more on the topic than you so sometimes it can be a good investment of your time.
One thing to remember about personal development is that it’s an ongoing process. You’re never done with it. There is no real finish line.
For this reason, it’s best to develop tenacity and persistence as you follow the path you’re creating for yourself.
You will be adjusting as you go, based on facts and learning about what is really and truly important to you deep in your subconscious.
It’s all about knowing who you are and living a life that illustrates who you are. Good luck!
