Personal development can be a big boost to professional development and can greatly help in advancing careers. While professional development does take a halt after obtaining the required qualifications and training, personal development is a lifelong journey and can only help you to improve relationships.
Starting Out on Personal Development
Personal development need not be undertaken just to boost a career. It can also help you to live a much better life at the personal level and add to your spiritual growth. Personal development requires making a continuous effort to become a better person, in every aspect of life.
Personal development must help you to have a positive attitude. This can help you in every stage of life and lead you to develop an attitude of solving problems instead of being overwhelmed by them. To start with, one needs to have a clear idea of what one is striving to achieve. Make an assessment of your present attitude, efficiency, time management and productivity. Include your personal life also in such assessment and judge yourself in areas of temper, affability and relationships with those close to you.
Once you have done this, you will be face to face with your deficiencies.
Decide on the aspects of your attitude and behavior that you need to change. Get yourself a mentor, who can take an unbiased view of things and suggest improvements to all behavioral patterns. Set goals for the improvements and decide on a written plan to achieve this. Writing it down can let you constantly refer to these goals and remain motivated. This can mean going through self help books or attending courses that help personal development.
Start the study of the books or the courses and ensure that you give it all the seriousness that it deserves. Introspect at intervals, and be brutally frank in such self appraisal. It can help you to understand the areas that need strengthening. Make sure your goals are not too far fetched and unattainable as there can be no greater disincentive for development than the realization that you are not moving forward at the pace that you want to.
Ensure that you remain in good health at all times. This may mean, that besides the personal development quests, you also need to eat healthy, exercise adequately and have enough rest.
Personal Development is a Slow Process
The realization that you need personal development comes from your having to constantly confront failures or perceived inefficiencies. Most of these are due to mental and physical habits that have been ingrained into your life, due to the environment that you have lived in. These habits are developed over the years and are thus not very easy to change. A sudden change of habits is rarely possible, and even if achieved can come at huge mental and sometimes physical cost.
Basically, you need to learn to organize your life by having control over your thoughts, emotions and actions. This is not easy to do, and does require a definite effort at all times. Personal development can never take a halt and needs to go on throughout your life. You may find yourself having to constantly change goals, as your position in life changes, or age and other personal circumstances start making their presence felt in your life.
Personal development can help you to have a purpose in life. It will definitely make a change in the way others look at you, and if this in anyway helps your social relationships, it can be a huge plus point.