Are you totally happy with your life? It wouldn’t surprise me if your initial response was to ask the question “Is anyone totally happy with their life?” Fair comment. So let me rephrase the question. “Is there any area of your life right now that you are not happy with?” Is that a better question?

You may be one of the fortunate ones who can say they are happy in every area of their life. However, I bet you are like most people in our society, who are probably unhappy with one or more areas of their lives. If that is the case, let me talk to you about personal development.

Before I move on it may be useful to offer a definition of personal development. I decided to do some research on the internet and Google the term personal development. I was surprised to find that there were not really that many sites that offered a definition, although there were many adverts promoting personal development. I shouldn’t be surprised because Marketdata a research firm has estimated that the personal development industry is set to grow at a rate of 11.4 yearly through to 2010, to a value of $13.9 billion.

“Personal development is the deliberate growth or development of a particular individual to bring out their potential and capabilities making them more aware of their inner feelings, belief systems to become a more conscious, whole or healthy human being”.

I know that probably seems like a mouthful but it seemed to encompass my own thoughts about what personal development is. I decided to ask my partner to offer a definition:

“Strategies that enable me to enhance my life in all areas”

Now I do like this definition because it says what it is, simply and succinctly. The thing about personal development, is that it means different things to different people. When someone embarks on the journey of personal development, it maybe that they have chosen to improve their health, relationships, career prospects, finances etc. Sometime people talk about the mind, body and spirit, or physical, emotional and spiritual.

So how do you get started on the road to personal development? Well, first of all become aware of what you already have in your life and what you are grateful for and then think about what is missing, what do you want, I mean really want. Awareness has to come first, because without an awareness there can be no conscious decision to take action. Becoming aware also means asking yourself different questions and then seeking out the answers. So if your question is “There must be more to life than this?” your mind is already making an assumption that there is more to life and as if by magic you start to see things around you that maybe you did not notice before.

Below I have put together my top 10 strategies that I use regularly to keep myself motivated. As a bonus I contacted some of my friends within the personal development field and asked them to give me their top 3 personal development books and created a top 10 list. I hope this helps you to get started.

1. Take time everyday to do something for yourself. This is so fundamental. Many people go through their day giving of themselves to other people, their job etc. and don’t have time for themselves. Even if you give yourself 15 minutes, that is time with yourself to reflect and focus on the most important person in your life, YOU.

2. Read or listen to personal development material. You must find time to learn about personal development to read or listen to positive and inspirational messages. You could use the 15 minutes put by for yourself to read a chapter of a book. If you drive, put in a tape or CD, this is making use of net (no extra time) time.

3. Decide what you really want to do and do it. Often we think about what we want to do and make excuses as to why we can’t do it. The reality is that the time we have taken to think up excuses as to why we can’t do something, we could have done it. What have you been putting off doing? Take this opportunity to do it, clear out the clutter. Once you have done it there is space in your mind to think about other things.

4. Do not be afraid of making a mistake. You will only achieve success from doing. In history many brilliant ideas have come about because of a mistake. Don’t let fear of failure stop you from doing what you want.

5. Do not put off making a decision because you are afraid it may be the wrong one. Nothing is gained by sitting on the fence. So the sooner you make a decision, even if it is the wrong one, the sooner you can make the right one. Practise being decisive.

6. Keep a journal recording your thoughts, ideas, feelings and personal growth. Keeping a journal is a great way of measuring your progress. Looking back at your journey. It is also a great source of material for any projects you hope to do in the future. If one of your dreams is to write a book, why not start with jotting down ideas in a journal.

7. Be flexible and willing to change your approach if things are not working. Sometimes when you set your mind to do something, with a set plan, things don’t always go smoothly. Remember that as long as you are clear about your destination, you can always change your route, it may take you longer, but as long as you get there in the end.

8. Visualise your goals on a daily basis. Better still put up pictures of your goals so that you can see them on waking up and going to bed. Our minds respond better to pictures than words.

9. Get yourself and elastic band and put it around your wrist. Make sure it fits loosely. Every time you find yourself thinking a negative thought pull the elastic band and let go so that it snaps back onto your wrist. Yes, it will hurt. That is the whole idea. Keep this up for the next 30 days and notice what happens.

10. Celebrate your achievements. Award yourself for any progress that you make because you deserve it.

Sonia is a Personal Development and Success Consultant. She has been involved in the personal development industry for over 20 years primarily in the public sector. When you visit her website be sure to download the free Confidence Building ecourse and sign up for her success strategies and tools newsletter.

We’ve written before about Impact Factory’s brand of Professional Personal Development (Professional Personal Development What is it?), but we’re just going to take a little side step here to talk about the broader issue of Personal Development.

This is because there’s an awful lot of talk about personal development and for some people, they’re not quite sure how it relates to them. Often when we become adults, learn new skills, have a job, a relationship (or not), friends, colleagues, we’re pretty much set in who we are, how we think and behave and what the nature of our emotional selves is.

Personal Development can sometimes seem like a pretty daunting ‘task’ rather than something to be desired or pursued. Do I have to change everything about me? Won’t it be painful and emotionally wrenching? Do I have to change everything about me? I’ll lose my friends if I change too much.

Common myths. And myths they are if you look at the gentler, more humane way to approach personal development. It shouldn’t be wrenching; you don’t need to have an ‘epiphany’ and change your ways forever; it should be a natural evolution of who you already are, not a tearing apart and a putting back together again.

Although Impact Factory primarily works with people in the workplace, the issues surrounding personal development are the same in any area of your life.

And here are a few reasons why:

Reverting to type and dealing with the feelings

What is very clear to anyone that works with people is that under pressure, people will ‘revert to type’. In normal circumstances, when there’s no pressure, everyone knows how they would like to deal with things differently. However, when decisions need to be made quickly, when things aren’t working as you would wish, when others become more demanding, most people under stress will behave as they always have. They will not have the time, nor will they make the time to weigh and measure their options.

What they will do is react to the current situation and do what they’ve always done to get a speedy result. What they have always done may not – often is not – the most appropriate choice to make; but it seems to be the only one available to them at the time. It is in hindsight that other options become clear.

People cannot help reverting to type. It is how the species has survived: when a mastodon came into view, people didn’t take time to ponder their options; they acted immediately. That vital mechanism is within us all: under threat we will react without conscious thought in order to survive.

However, without well-developed people skills, pressurised communication in all areas of our lives can look like bullying or blaming where it’s easier to accuse or order someone around rather than encourage. It can mean that people will avoid conflict and back down from useful confrontation where differences could get resolved. People will make incorrect assumptions and then act on them. Reverting to type can also mean avoiding getting support from others because you feel you have to do everything yourself.

When people revert to type, they are usually driven by their feelings, and it will usually be feelings that get in the way of being able to change behaviour constructively. Most people know how they would like to behave, so teaching the ‘how to’ is not at issue here.

Feelings that can get in the way of effectiveness can be anything from nervousness about presenting, to fear of humiliation for saying something stupid, to being intimidated by a particular person who seems to wrong-foot you all the time. Feelings can make you shy away from handling tricky situations from saying no to Christmas dinner with the parents to asking for a raise or communicating more honestly with a colleague.

At Impact Factory we address the fact that at times (more often than not) uncomfortable feelings will make it difficult, if not impossible, to create the outcome you want. Otherwise, people are trying to cope with new information and new techniques without acknowledging that their emotions can, at times, stop them making any change whatsoever.

That’s not personal development, and trying to learn new things without that essential acknowledgement usually means the learning won’t stick.

Changing yourself to change others

We hear over and over again in people’s personal and work lives that things would be much better if only someone else would change the way they do things. “If my sister wasn’t so stubborn, we’d have a much easier relationship.” “I’d get on much better if only my line manager would give me more time to get things done.” “My job would be easier if only my secretary was more efficient.” “My parents are so frustrating; if only they would start treating me like an adult.”

In these and many other examples, the solution seems to rest with someone else. Therefore, the responsibility for moving things forward rests with others as well. There will always be situations where life would be far better if someone else would just shape up and do things the way we think they ought to be done! However, that attitude puts all the power and influence into someone else’s hands and leaves us feeling impotent and often inadequate. You can have a good moan, but nothing changes.

Changing what you do, changing the way you speak to others, changing your attitude towards recurring difficulties will change the normally predictable outcome.

When we talk about change, we are looking for simple changes; tweaks, adjustments, small alterations, rather than looking to change everything about a person. At Impact Factory we talk about the least amount of change for the greatest impact. Striving for small but effective changes rather than complete transformation.

That’s’ how true personal development needs to happen: not massive life-changing upheaval, but easily manageable, incremental changes that don’t require you to change everything about yourself (or expect everyone else to change as well).

When we work with people’s personal development on our workshops we make it easy and enjoyable and filled with variety, so that there is ‘something for everyone’. What works for one person, won’t necessarily work for others. We believe that the way forward is to find a few things that you know you’ll be able to do, to have fun doing them and to experience enough small wins as you practise them. These are the things you’ll be able to remember in the heat of a difficult situation. You will revert to a new type that feels familiar because it’s developed from who you already are, not about becoming someone you’ll never be!

Real life, not make believe

Here’s one way that we do that: we use real-life, everyday situations that people encounter on the job or in their personal lives, rather than giving people made up, textbook scenarios they then have to ‘act out’. Working with real issues helps people recognise and understand their feelings rather than ignoring them or wishing they would go away.

We know that if you spend time learning and developing new skills on a course there needs to be a realistic bridge between the workshop room and real life.

We always ask people to bring in their own experiences – a challenging presenting situation, a recurring difficult person or problem, an upcoming meeting, etc. Within those real-life scenarios, we use some of the tools and techniques that the individual has practised during the training and has already found works for them.

By letting people work on their specific issues and then incorporating their favourite techniques into the re-enactments, they get to choose what they feel able to do, rather than ones they ought to do.

And if we could sum up our entire philosophy in one word it would be: choice.

When people feel they have choice, they feel more confident and better able to deal with the ordinary and the extraordinary of work and personal life.

And that’s how we make personal development personal as well!

There’s no doubt about it: Self Improvement is big business. No matter where we look we seem to see men attired in business suits and fancy haircuts. Sporting dinky little ear-piece microphones, they speak to us as though we were attending the annual general meeting of their multi-national self-development business which, I suppose, isn’t that far from the truth. They speak to us in sound-bites; “I’m gunna show you how…”, “you just need to follow my plan: no thought required; just follow the plan”. Success and winning, they preach to the audience, are a sure thing.

But is self development a sure thing? If, like me, you believe self development is a life journey that is never completed, you know that the only sure thing is that the search for self development is far from being a sure thing. The journey will entail more failures than successes, more loss than gain and more self-doubt than we think we can endure. The only way to improve one’s self is to challenge the habits and assumptions we have gathered along the way. To go out on a limb with no guarantee of finding what we want takes courage. No ‘success plan’ would contemplate such a course of action!

So, if we can’t get succor from the self improvement ‘gurus’, who can we turn to?

The answer, I believe, is to look to the people who have always explored every single aspect of the human condition. They did not always find the answer, but they all had courage. They are of course, the world’s artists.

How can a painting help us toward our goal of self improvement you might ask? Well, some paintings help to bring serenity and a feeling of inner peace; I feel this whenever I look at an Impressionist painting, especially paintings by Berthe Morisot. She was never recognized as a great artist during her lifetime; she was relegated to the category of “feminine” artists because of her usual subject matter — women, children, and domestic scenes. Her paintings are intensely intimate. She is an example of someone who never gave up on pursuing what she thought was worth while despite being largely ignored.

Jackson Pollock instills different but equally powerful feelings. I used to believe all modern artists “just throw a bit of paint on a canvas and call it art”. My preconceptions were swept away when I was lucky enough to attend an exhibition devoted to his work. His paintings were beautiful and challenged the way I look at a painting. The search for your inner self is all about challenging your currently held notions.

Music is probably the easiest of the arts for us to accept as an aid toward our search for self development. How often does a certain piece of music make us feel happy, relaxed, romantic, hopeful, fulfilled? You name it, music hits all the buttons. My favourite music is anything by Beethoven. His music makes me feel all of the aforementioned. He was a man who accepted nothing less than perfection. He sort redemption through his music. Ultimately, he didn’t find it and he spent much of his life feeling alone. But his courage of conviction made his life, and countless others, a better thing. His last words were “Applaud, my friends, the comedy is over.”

Perhaps our greatest inspiration comes from writers. They have helped me, and millions of others, to find the inner self. Life would be a much poorer experience without our great writers. I won’t name all the writers that have inspired me; there are too many. But if there was one thing I would urge you to do, it is to read. If you’re not sure who to read then go to a library and ask! Tell the librarian what it is that you want to experience, feel or learn when you read a book. They’ll help you; don’t let shyness defeat you. If you can’t get to a library then join a reading club on the internet. The one thing I have found is that people, who love to read, love to help others to read books.

So, forget about buying into those testosterone, succeed-at-all-costs seminars, ebooks and DVDs. Go and look at a painting; or lie on the sofa and listen to music, maybe dance wildly to it, cry with it, make love in time to it; or curl up and read a book that will take you where you never thought possible.

You may not get to where you wished, but Art will accompany you every single step of the way.

Stress is a part of life whether we like it or not. One of the most important self improvement skills you can ever learn is to better manage your stress levels in your lifestyle and workplace. Problems, big or small, can affect us emotionally, mentally and physically. High stress levels can leave us feeling chronic emotions of doubt, desperation, anxiety, and leave us feeling generally short tempered and irritable if we let it get out of control. It is important you learn to control stress before it even begins to grow ? and the secret to that self improvement success depends on you.

* Body self-improvement techniques *
Taking care of your body is a vital initial step to self-improvement. We should be sensitive to what our body needs by knowing how stress affects our physical self to adapt to it. Here are some techniques that you can use to improve your body and getting stress out of your system.

1. It is very important to know the limits of our body especially when it comes to dealing with stress. Some people would justify that the more our body is exposed to stress, the stronger we become ? this is just not true. If you feel constant aches and pains while working, then you should take some time off work and relax before it turns to something really serious. Chronic fatigue syndrome is one of the most common side effects of chronic stress out of control in your life.

2. Relax and enjoy. To help your body relieve stress then you need to engage in some fun activities that will help it along the road to recovery. A massage is perfect for energizing your body while getting rid of those tight muscles that will eventually lead pain and limit your body flexibility. Pamper yourself by visiting a health spa or massage clinic at least once week; a few hours with professional hands can do wonders.

3. Exercise and sweat it out. Not many people can allocate the time and effort for physical exercise, but if you really want to enjoy a stress free life then you better learn to manage your time to include some physical activity every week. Even better, some daily 1 hour exercise can do wonders to your cardiovascular functions and keep your heart in proper working order.

* Self-improvement for a stress free life *
The tips above cover the physical side of releasing stress, but your mind is still vulnerable to its attacks. Even if we feel the physical and emotional backlash of the problems that we face, it will always start with how you think and how you come up with creative ways in dealing with it. So before you can apply the tips above, you have to first condition your mind by focusing on the need to improve yourself and your lifestyle choices in getting rid of stress.

* Some Mental Activities That Will Help Relieve Stress *
Most stressed individuals think that doing fun activities will not reduce the effect of problems that they tackle under career, social or personal pressure. Since stress will first affect the mental functions of an individual, it is very important to teach the person focus his mind on positive thoughts rather than dwelling on negative ones. Logical functions are put to the test by introducing the Rubik?s Cube, Scrabble, and Bridge, into their curriculum. If you have no plans of visiting health centers to deal with stress, you can easily incorporate these games into your daily routine to give your mind some diversion from problems.

Engaging in some form of sports is a great way to relieve stress. You can opt for team sports like basketball, soccer or volleyball which provides socializing functions and exercise. The strenuous activities of a sport program can develop your muscles and improve your coping mechanism for dealing with stress, and allows the body to release chemicals and hormones that is beneficial to your physiological well-being.

Cardiovascular workouts can improve your heart and strengthen it to avoid stress related problems like strokes, high-blood pressure, chest pains and rapid heart beat. Note however that working out at the gym needs proper diet as well since your physical attributes will be worked to the limit to help fight off stress. Fresh fruits and vegetables are necessary improves digestion and supplies the body with the required nutrients it needs. Red meat can give your muscles proteins that will strengthen muscle tissues for added flexibility. Drink plenty of filtered water and cut back on soda and coffee.

A healthy dose of mental activities, physical exercise coupled with a balanced fresh diet can help a person avoid the signs and symptom of stress and will be on the road to recovery to a stress free life. These fundamental self improvement skills will help you to get and stay healthy for a better and stress free life.

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