Where To Start With Personal Development

For every walk of life, you always want to be at your best – have a view of what you want to achieve and portray yourself in the most presentable way possible. Learning never really stops and you will always improve at something if you do more of it.

You may be interested to know and pinpoint what personal development is and what sort of plan you can use to move forward and enhance your skills effectively.

If you want to learn more about what personal development is and how you can use it in everyday life to become the greatest version of yourself, keep reading along with us!

What Is Personal Development?

If you didn’t know already, personal development consists of many different activities that can upgrade a person’s skill set. Whether it be a mental, physical activity – in the workplace, for business or even outside your job, personal development is there to boost your performance consistently at a steady rate if done correctly.

Most of the time, if you’re looking for ways to take up personal development and implement it into your schedule, it will consist of earning a new qualification, learning a new skill, improving your mental well-being, refining your current skill set, building muscle/ losing weight, etc.

Whatever quality of life you wish to choose, there are many ways you can go about achieving your goals. If the goal is to lose weight – a schedule and plan will have to be put in place to reach your desired weight quickly and professionally. For example, you may need coaching or a diet plan with lots of cardio in place to keep you disciplined and stop your bad habits.

If you have a 9-5 job it may feel like there’s no time in the day to improve yourself as you’re always so busy. To combat what you feel like maybe no time – a development plan of action needs to be in place. Without this, it is easy to get caught up in groundhog day – letting life go past day by day without realising. Finally focusing on what you want out of life needs to be constantly in the forefront of your mind and action needs to be taken.

However, you can’t just work on yourself for a month or two – to then go back to what you were doing before as all the work you’ve put in to improve would’ve been wasted. Personal development has to be a consistent commitment throughout your entire life – the belief and drive to progress your skills and knowledge.

If you’re unsure of where to start on your development journey, here are a few strategies to help you get off to a good start:

Creating a Personal Development Plan

When creating a personal development plan, the first thing you have to take into account is exactly what it is you want to achieve. Focusing on too many goals at once can cause burnout and take your motivation away within a matter of days if you’re not seeing any results.

Prioritising your goals and taking action every single day with a deadline of when you want to achieve them will hone your focus and attention levels. Without all the other potential goals you want to achieve floating around causing chaos – just having one or two of your most important goals in a specific deadline makes it easier to keep your vision secure.

Now is the time to start taking action on the specific goals you set. Whether it’s the weight loss journey or learning how to use certain software, etc – action matters and you have to put the work in to reap the rewards.

Track your progress with whatever you’re trying to improve on, as often it becomes easy to abandon hope in yourself when you’re not physically seeing the progress you’re making. When it is in front of your eyes and you can see how much you’re improving daily – it becomes more rewarding and apparent to you that you are doing well!

Your Body and Energy Patterns

We work based on how we feel – whether that be physical, mental or spiritual work. Our energy levels and willpower is what keeps us awake and productive. A lot of this energy comes from what we eat and drink throughout the day. If you’re eating a lot of sugary and fatty foods, not only is it bad for you physically but it can affect your mental state and energy levels. Eating unhealthy foods may boost your energy for a while, however, your energy levels can sharply drop and cause you to feel worse than you did before eating the unhealthy drink or food.

Working a 9-5 as we also know can completely deplete your energy and most people are then finished for the day. They go home, chill, sleep and then repeat. This is an easy habit to fall into – however, if you’re looking to develop your skills and knowledge you have to overcome and do extra work.

One of the most important factors to boost your energy is to get enough exercise. Exercise causes endorphins and positivity to flow through your body – causing your mood to be better throughout the day. When your mood and energy is right from exercise, this allows you to be more productive with whatever your goals are outside of work. Not only will you start looking better, but it’s going to positively affect your mental state throughout the day.

Focus on Your Breathing

Reducing as much stress and anxiety as possible will always be a beneficial experience for task management throughout your day. Box breathing is a great breathing technique to reduce stress as it helps slow down your breathing.

To achieve this you have to: exhale for four seconds, hold your lungs empty for four seconds, inhale for four seconds, hold air in your lungs for four seconds and then repeat this cycle.

What this does is distract your brain as you focus on the four counts – which sends a message to the central nervous system to calm down which forces your stress to reduce. When you breathe now, it should feel a lot less stressful. Try it out!