Personal Development

I’ve read quite a few absolutely great articles on goal setting in the past week or so, and would like to present a short list of them for your and my own future reference.

John Richardson has recently posted two articles on goal setting on his Success Begins Today blog:
- Goals: Create The Gallery of Your Life – in this article you are presented with an idea of making (drawing or composing from someone else’s images and photos) ideal images of your achieved goals. Visualizing your success is a great help on its own, but when you have an image symbolizing this vision it’s even better!
- Paint by Number Goals is a follow-up to the first article, and it gives you options of painting by numbers – there are always easier ways to reach your goals because someone has already drawn the necessary lines and all you have to do is just follow the path.

Scott H Young has posted an Effective Goal Setting guide, showing how aggressive goal setting could harm by forcing you to lose sight of the bigger picture. He gives advices on when you should go for more goals, and when it’s probably time for you to relax a bit.
I’ve picked two posts by Steve Pavlina:
- Setting Your Primary Focus – a very useful skill to master is to learn how to identify and set your primary focus.
- Achieving Goals By Improving Your Character – very interesting article on asking yourself questions to identify what you can improve in your character to obtain better results. As usual, Steve gives you all the necessary pointers.
OnlyOneMike gives you 3 reasons Why You Must Have Goals, which seem more like benefits, not reasons. If you’re looking for an extra motivation before you get started with your goal setting you should definitely read this article.
Glen from LifeDev thinks Goal Setting Should Be Razor Sharp: they should be clear and simple enough, yet have enough focus to be attainable.

That’s all for now. Not sure if I’m going to be updating this post or will have a separate section created for goal-setting links, but these few links should be enough for today in any case. Hope you find them useful, and if you can thing of some more – please let me know by leaving a comment.

Well folks, it’s been almost a year of me working on Personal Development Ideas, and I have to admit it’s been a thrilling experience.

I’d like to offer you my list of top 10 personal development ideas I’ve learned from working on this site. I’ve found them to be so useful and powerful, that I really think you could use some of them too – give some of them a try and you’ll be amazed how much you will benefit. The list is in no particular order, as only you will know how important each idea really is in your life.

Read books regularly. Write articles or posts.

Your brain needs new information daily to keep developing, and reading new books is one of the best ways to do just that. Find a few minutes a day to read books on personal development, and it will help you grow even if you don’t find any terribly useful ideas in any book.

A hint for personal development readers: stop searching for that revolutionary book that will solve all your problems! There is none. You should be happy if you get an idea or two of each book, and even them will probably be only fine-tuning your existing experience and not introducing something entirely new.

Be sure to write something, too – it will benefit you in a number of ways, from improving your handwriting/typing skills and raising your spelling knowledge to allowing you analyze the material you’ve read, process it and produce your view of it. Writing greatly helps you to memorize things, so reading books on personal development and then posting your thoughts on the same topic in your blog will have a double effect of learning some important life lessons.

Wake up earlier

There are many articles explaining all the benefits of waking up earlier. My 5am mornings have helped me identify the following:

I’m more productive in early hours of a morning that in late hours of an evening. Most people are like that.
The earlier you wake up, the less distraction you’re going to have. Most people are asleep, and you can enjoy some quiet time doing anything you like: blogging, exercising, reading a book.
The best hours of your sleep are between 10pm and midnight. You will need less time for your sleep if you catch these two magical hours. Go to bed later, and you will need longer sleep to fully rest and up your energy levels.
You may get an extra hour or two a day once you find the exact time needed for your sleep

Ask positive questions

By simply changing the way you ask questions, you can transform your whole life: get into a good mood more often, solve complex problems and find unique solutions in even the worst situations.

I’ve explained why you need to learn this skill in my Positive Questions article:

Positive questioning is here to help you boost your confidence level, and do it the quick, easy and natural way. Asking positive questions means assuming you’re good enough to find the answer, and this way of asking yourself is a sure way to approach the right solution.Asking yourself positive questions and generally taking a positive approach to any task will take most of possible pressure and nervousness off your shoulders, leaving your mind clear and sharp, ready to solve even the hardest problems.

Learn to fail. It’s part of your success

I’ve accepted failures as a very natural part of my life long time ago. The only person who doesn’t fail is the one who doesn’t do anything.I suggest that you learn to fail successfully:

Any failure is a measure of a progress. If you can say you’ve failed in something, this usually means you’ve actually tried some things out and worked rather hard to do your best. And so, your efforts were not futile, albeit not enough to make you absolutely successful this time. It doesn’t mean you didn’t make any progress though!

Apply yourself, make sure you learn from your mistakes – and you’ve got yourself one of the best recipes for success in the long term. Do this consistently, use some planning in addition to it, and you’ll be doing better than 90% of all the people around you!

Do Your Goal Setting

It is absolutely vital to set your goals, otherwise how would you know whether you’re achieving them or not? To ensure you set your goals right, use some of my 3 golden rules of goal setting:

make sure your every goal is valuable to you – because you will not be able to put your efforts into something which has no value to you
make sure your every goal is an absolute necessity – unless you’re sure you absolutely have to achieve your goal, it will very soon drop down to the status of a “good to have” kind of things, and may be dropped and forgotten shortly after.
realize that achieving a goal is a process, not just a result – no point in spending your precious time in the hope that one day you’ll reach your goal and it will change your whole life. What if that never happens? Stay conscious about the fact that achieving your goal is a process – and learn to enjoy this process, this is the only way to be successful.

Focus on important things

Don’t waste your time on something which is not really important. Stop worrying about petty things and events, if they can’t have a major impact on your life. Slow down and take a note of aspects of your life which are really important to you. Learn to focus on what you want to improve.It’s so easy to let important things pass you by these days, that mastering the skill of focusing on what’s really important is a benefit you can’t afford to miss. Working on this aspect of your personal development will help you in long-term to achieve a much quicker and easier switch of your focus, which is a really useful skill to have. Just imagine being able to fully engage in your work as soon as you arrive, and to easily stop thinking of your work as soon as you leave for home?

Focus also helps you concentrate on achieving the desired result by simply making everything else less visible and noticeable for a period of time. Learning to focus means ignoring all the noise and working on the real goal.

Master your habits

It is quite possible (and actually not so hard) to work out the habits you want and to get rid of the habits you don’t need.Take control of your habits by finding the pain and pleasure associated with every habit, and by focusing on them as needed.

I’ve mastered many habits over the past year, and what I can tell is that after just a few months and a few habits successfully mastered, you will gain both the knowledge and the confidence needed for controlling any habit you want.

Here are just a few things you can make a habit to make yourself a better person and enjoy your life in ways never possible:

wake up as early as 5am
always think of ways to please people around you – start with your family
exercise regularly
make sure to regularly read books and write posts or articles

Get organized

Organize your workplace and your home office, designate areas and time for processing your email and other incoming information like letters, magazines, newspapers and print-outs. Get rid of all the stuff you don’t need, and learn to do it during your processing sessions. For instance, if you have time in the morning to read your emails – go through all the new mails and decide on the next action right there for each email in your inbox – put useful information into appropriate folders and delete useless emails right away. Label the rest so that it’s easy for you to later see what emails need to be replied first.

Organize your contacts and your books, and learn more about personal finance. Staying organized isn’t an easy task, but trust me, it’s the best approach. If you don’t organize anything, you will eventually start missing important meetings, forgetting emails and losing money. No wonder getting organized costs huge sums of money when professional consultants come to your office and do it for you. Why wait till this happens, when you can easily get and stay organized by spending just a mere 5-15 minutes a day?

Plan ahead and manage time effectively

Start planning everything you do, and be sure to review your plans now and then to reflect on why some things on your list did or did not happen. You should plan for everything – including your time off and holiday breaks, hobbies and other activities.

Get into a habit of planning your week ahead, even if it’s just a high-level overview of what has to be done.

Managing your time effectively means working out a number of skills like reviewing and prioritizing your plan and actions. I seems that I always have time to do things, and in most cases I achieve this by simply planning only as much as I can realistically do, and reviewing my progress regularly to stay focused and prioritize tasks effectively.

Use 2 minutes approach in everything you do (taken from my Finding Time For Everything article):

Our life isn’t about sacrifices, but if there are any we’re making at all, then time is definitely one of them. To do anything, you have to put your time to it. So whenever a new opportunity arises, don’t simply throw it away by saying you have no time. Take the 2 minutes approach again. Look at the opportunity. See it a goal. See what the positive sides are. Try and quickly break it into some steps, and try to predict the time commitment required for each.

Finally, make some effort to reclaim your time: book time for regular commitments, track your time with time-sheets and review your plans regularly to see where most of your time is spent. Once you have all the information, you will be surprised how easy it really is for you to find an extra hour or two a week.

LoveYou can’t grow personally without love for many things. You’ve got to love yourself and enjoy self-growth and constant improvements you’re making. You need to love what you’re doing – it will benefit everything you do, be it something at work or at home. Love your family and cherish your friends. Be caring and genuinely interested in others.

Here are the words by Beatles which say it best:

There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done.
Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung.
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game
It’s easy.

There’s nothing you can make that can’t be made.
No one you can save that can’t be saved.
Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be in time
It’s easy.

All you need is love, all you need is love,
All you need is love, love, love is all you need.

That’s all I’ve got for you today. I’d like to thank you for your interest and your patience, and use this opportunity to wish you success in your personal development. Try making some of these ideas part of your life, and I’m sure you will enjoy a healthier, happier and more balanced life. Let me know how it works out, will you? ;)

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Personal Development Ideas: Top 10

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