Focus On These Personal Development Goals For A Better You

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One of the best goals you can set for yourself is to strive for continual self-development through learning, interaction, and experience. Most times it is easier to achieve continual personal development through a conscious effort. Self-improvement is key to one’s success in all facets of life be it, career, business, or personal life.

Self-growth is not an easy task but can be achieved through a continuous effort from an individual, but first, you got to know yourself according to Aristotle. Personal development goals usually involve the learning of certain skills to achieve self-improvement as an individual. I will discuss 17 personal development goals to focus on to enable self-growth for you.

1. Build Your Emotional Intelligence — also referred to as EQ is the ability to understand, use, and manage your own emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges and defuse conflict. When you put effort into understanding why people act or react in certain ways it helps you improve your communication skill which is crucial in your personal growth.
2. Self — Confidence — Self-confidence is crucial to success according to research. Just being intelligent is not enough you have to have self-belief and show it to those around you so that they can have confidence in your ability and capacity which leads to them having trust in you. Along with perseverance, self-confidence is vital to one’s success in any project. So effort should be put into boosting your self-confidence, which should be one of your personal development goals. One of the reasons for boosting your self-confidence is that there is a strong association between confidence and success. Hence, one of your self-development goals should definitely boost your self-confidence.
3. Listen Actively — Active listening entails paying attention to people while they are speaking to you, maintain eye contact, observe body language, and display and openness through your own body language. You need to show people that you value their opinions and what they have to say, ask open questions, and create a safe environment around yourself to encourage people to share information with you willingly.
4. Build A Positive Body Language — having positive body language can give you access to various information and benefits. For example, putting your arms across your chest or hands in pockets is deemed as been closed and not open, display openness through body language endears trust and confidence in you from others.
5. Network — you need to network with people and also build a cordial relationship with them. According to John Donne, “no man is an island to himself”, hence you need to rely on people to learn from them, get help from them, and achieve your goals with a little help from your network. You also need to render help and share knowledge with those in your network in order to build a symbiotic relationship, where both parties stand to gain from the relationship. Building an honest and open relationship is key to building an effective network that aids your self-growth.
6. Go Easy on Yourself — you need to build up self-love and pride in yourself. Spending time by yourself reflecting and planning is vital to personal improvement. Like some people say you need to enjoy keeping yourself company. In those quiet times, you spend on your own try to draw inspiration and ideas from studying and research as well.
7. Stop Procrastinating — Procrastination is not a good habit and should be stopped if you want to be successful or achieve self-growth. Whatever you need to get done, there is no better time to get started than now. This helps you put your time to effective use instead of being idle or non-productive.
8. Rise Up Early — Develop the habit of waking up early as the saying goes “the early bird gets the worm”. You can exercise for fitness when you get up early from bed and you can start working on a project early before the activities of the day begin. You can achieve so much by waking up early because that gives you more available time in the day to go after your tasks or goals. Research has shown that waking up early helps in becoming more productive which leads to happiness and fulfillment.
9. Be Proactive — Being proactive helps you with achieving your goals and never giving up. You need to believe that you are responsible for your own success, not other people. You need to take ownership and responsibility for the results you get from your endeavors and work towards success.
10. Conflict Resolution Skill — There is no way you can avoid conflict in life, hence you need to learn how to resolve them whenever they arise. Read my article on overcoming objections Having the ability to resolve conflicts sure aids in self-growth because it means you can overcome challenges to achieve the desired results.
11. Move On — you have to learn to move on and forget the past especially in situations where you were not successful or you did not achieve your desired results. You need to let go of the past so that it does not become a burden that weighs you down, which can have a negative impact on your mindset towards success and being happy.
12. Read, then Read Some More — This is a good way to build knowledge that is required in your personal development journey. There is a wealth of knowledge stored in books both hard and soft copies. You need to build the habit of reading on a daily basis. Reading will definitely help you acquire new skills and refine existing skills as well. Research has proved that acquiring new knowledge satisfies one’s thirst for competence.
13. Stress Management — You need to develop your stress management capability because facing stress is part of life hence you will need to overcome its impact. Managing stress is required for you to be successful and to progress in your journey of personal development. There are numerous resources available to aid you in your bid to manage stress effectively. All you need to do is carry out research on stress management.
14. Focus On Your Strengths — You need to focus on your strengths and put your limitations behind you. This will enable you to build your self-confidence which will aid you in being successful and progress in your self-improvement journey. Your self-confidence will enable you to take calculated risks where necessary instead of allowing fear to get the best of you. Putting your limitations behind you does not mean you do not need to know them because it is in knowing your limitations that you can be able to improve on your developmental needs.
15. Share Knowledge — It is better to give than to receive. Sharing knowledge not only helps you refine your skills or knowledge but benefits the person or people you are sharing the knowledge with. To achieve mastery levels in a particular skill set you need to not only learn the skill but you need to teach the skill to others.
16. Increase Your Drive — Building your drive for success in all aspects of your life certainly helps you not only set your goals but to go after them. Drive aid in building one mindset for success. You just have to keep in mind that having a drive is not the same thing as acquiring success at a cost to other people.
17. Be Mindful — You need to be mindful of the present and avoid holding on to the past. You need to acknowledge the benefits in your life and the good things you have going for you. This helps you push forward in your personal development journey. You need to also respect other people’s opinions and culture in order to be able to communicate effectively with them.

We all want to be a better version of ourselves, but we have to do the needful to achieve this. The personal development goals listed above are a guide to help you in your journey to achieving personal or professional development. Of course, there are more goals you can pursue to achieve self-development. We all need to strive to achieve continuous self-improvement as this will aid us in our journey to success in all aspects of our lives.

That’s all folks.