Personal development is the enhancement of specific life skills which are necessary to facilitate happiness and success in one’s personal life. These life skills are the basic building blocks that form all the success or failures that you have in life. Personal development skills become the foundation from which all your achievements in life flow from and it has a direct relationship with winning and life success.
One key distinction between personal development skills and other skills that you might possess is that personal development skills are used 24 hours each day, whereas you may only be using your programming skills eight hours a day in the capacity of your employment. When you talk to someone, you are using personal development skills. What you decide to eat is personal development. When you investigate your feelings–that’s personal development. Even managing your sleeping habits belongs in personal development.
Personal development skills are life skills that must be honed in order to reap the benefits of a life worth living. The investment of time in developing yourself personally leads to a peak performing individual who lives a more fulfilling life than those who do not choose to develop themselves.
What Personal Development is Not
Personal development does not involve diagnosing or treating an illness or injury. There seems to be a general confusion in the personal development field concerning what it is and what it is not and since there are so many books at bookstores and libraries that miscatagorize mental illness books into the self-improvement section of the store, let me clarify that point. A key characteristic of someone who wants to practice personal development is that they are generally healthy and normal individuals who are able and willing to move forward in their lives. In other words, they want to become peak-performing individuals.
One of the secrets of highly successful people is that many of them digest huge volumes of information in the form of books, audio courses, and videos. Most of these successful people have fairly extensive personal development libraries that they rely upon for guidance and solutions. I suggest that you model this habit and start developing your own personal development library. Brian Tracy says that you should invest approximately 3% of your income into your own personal development and growth. So if your income is around $4,000 a month that means you should spend approximately $150 in personal development products and seminars to promote your own self improvement. Here are some tips to help you build a useful personal development library of your own:
o Binder your information. While books are great resources, I have found that many books contain only a few noteworthy gems of information in them–if even that. I have read many articles, on the other hand, that contain equal amounts of informational gems without all the fluff. These articles are of high value to me and are worth saving for future reference. You should make it a habit to archive these articles for future reference by punching holes in them and placing them in a 3 ring binder. Make sure you clearly label your binders, so that you know what is contained within them. Also, at the front of the binder, you should create a table of contents so that you can find the information more quickly. In this way, you can begin to build your personal development library with information that is of high value to you and get rid of the low-value stuff.
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How to Build Your Personal Development Library
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