What is Personal Development?

What is Personal Development?

When I first heard the words personal development I definitely attached a certain image in my head.  Usually it was associated to Tony Robbins and other folks associated with “motivational speaking”. And truthfully I never really listened to what Tony Robbins taught so I made up my mind about him and his teachings without even listening to anything he taught, which was very ignorant of me.  I didn’t need any pep talks and frankly my private investigation antenna was always up and I really didn’t trust any sort of thing like that.  

Personal development is not strictly associated to motivational type speakers.  Anything you do to improve yourself can be considered personal development including the following specific areas:

Improving Your Philosophy of Life

Your philosophy of life affects everything listed below in one way or another.  Your philosophy of life usually reflects all the influences you have had in your life over the years. Your philosophy of life is how you view the world.  

Improving your philosophy could be just taking responsibility for where you are in your life because of what you have done or failed to do.

Developing Your Personal Awareness

Personal awareness is being able to identify your strengths, weaknesses, what motivates you, or your shortfalls (financial, health, relational, skill levels, etc…).  Many people are truly unaware of these different aspects of their lives and never bother to take an honest inventory of their lives. 

Improving Your Health

Improving your health makes a huge difference in someone’s energy, appearance and the way one can feel about themselves when they look in the mirror.  For some folks this is very easy to do and stick to healthy habits. While for others it can be a lot of ups and downs in the journey to overall better health. This could be related to exercise and better eating habits. One thing for sure is true, and that is you can’t out run bad eating habits. Personal development and being the master of you can be life changing if you allow it to be.

Improving your skills 

Regardless of what job or industry you are in you will always need to improve your skills. 

 If you are a manager you will want to improve your management and leadership skills.  Being able to build trust with those you lead will go a long way in your role as a manager. 

If you are a writer you will want to improve your writing and storytelling skills.  

If you are an investigator you will want to improve your interview and surveillance skills.  Seeking to be better will make your clients happier, which in turn will make them want to send more work your way.  And of course the better you are in general means there will be more hours to bill.

Improving Your Speaking Skills

Words are very powerful.  The can be used to inspire, teach and motivate.  They can also be used for negative things but for this purpose we will focus on the positive.  

If you have watched any of my live recorded podcasts you will see that I have a lot of umms and ahhhs in my podcast.  And even though the content itself is solid, for some people those umms and ahhs can be distracting for listeners. So much so, that the message is totally lost because they are fixated on the umms.  

Becoming a better speaker, at the very least would help with those distractions so my audience can focus more on the message.  

Down the road I hope to have the opportunity to speak to large groups of people to educate and inspire folks to be more than they are.  Until then, I will keep using this forum along with videos and podcasts :).

Developing New Skills

When I wanted to start PI Advice, I didn’t have the money to pay someone to create a website for me.  So I had to teach myself how to build a website using WordPress. And then I had to teach myself about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) if I wanted anyone to be able to find all the content I was creating on the website, so I did.  Then I learned about podcasting and making video so I could create even more content. I kept teaching myself new things so I could in turn reach more people and teach more people.  

Some of these skills have transferred into other areas of my life especially when I became a health coach.  I already felt comfortable talking on video and teaching since I had been doing it for so long on PI Advice. 

And that very knowledge has led me to some really cool conversations with other professionals in the website development community because while I might be in a different industry, I have learned quite a bit about their industry. 

Improving Your Time Management/Living in Structure

If there is one specific thing I have found incredibly powerful is time management and living in structure. 

Time management is just that, managing your time. This would be scheduling intentional time for different things in your life.  If you want to build a new skill, then I would set time in your schedule to work on that skill.

If you want to make sure you are consistently building your business then it will require you to create relationships with future clients. Scheduling that time to be intentional about building relationships will help with client acquisition and you will have a more consistent business (regardless of what business you are in).

Having intentional family time is important to me and if I am not careful I will consume myself with work and unintentionally avoid family time.  So by scheduling time for intentional family time I can be more present as a father and a husband so that time isn’t interrupted by work.

Living in structure has a great deal to do with time management but it also has to do with goals.  If you make goals for yourself whether it be in health, business or even in your relationships, it will behove you to structure your life/actions in a way that it supports your goals.  That structure will exist and you will do it whether you feel like it or not because you know that the actions you schedule for yourself help you move towards those goals you set for yourself.  

• How I Currently Do This

For me, I have scheduled time for myself daily to work out because I have goals related to getting stronger to eventually start wrestling again.  If I don’t schedule the time I will either waste that time during the day or something else will fill the time.

I am up by 6:30 am every morning to work on my health coaching business and at the very least I dedicate one hour to it.  I do this every morning Monday through Friday to build our business.

As I write this I am looking to build structure into each day to create videos, podcasts and to write again for those wanting to grow regardless of what industry they are in.  

Again, if I am not intentional about it and schedule a time for it, it won’t get done. Something will always get in the way.  I want all these little things that I do that move me towards my goals and I want them to become habits.

Improving Your Communication Skills

Improving communication can change your work relationships, relationships with your children, and my favorite..a better relationship with your spouse in positive ways. Communication is not as much about what you say as to what they hear.  And if you start to interpret conversations differently you can respond differently.

For instance, identifying when someone is objecting to something because it is new or change is happening. Or identifying when people put walls up because a topic might be requiring someone to change or situations to change verses just thinking that the person is unreasonable.

Though I am not perfect, working on my communication with my wife has helped fundamentally change my marriage.  Understanding how she communicates helps me to respond better which in turn makes our marriage better.

Improving/Developing Leadership Skills

Leadership is an ongoing focus for me and my wife and it will be something I pursue being better at for the rest of my life.  There have been plenty of books this year that have influenced the way I think of leadership which I will share with you in this section.

Leadership has many different faucets that I won’t try to break down in a small paragraph because there are 100’s of books on the topic.

One big thing in leadership for me, is wanting to help mentor folks to outgrow me, and not being threatened by that personally.  I want to help create other leaders and not just more followers. There is a lot that goes into being a good leader that will help every business flourish if you do it the right way. 

Three books I will recommend because I have read them is Developing the Leader Within You, Developing the Leaders Around You and The 5 Levels of Leadership all of which are written by John Maxwell.  These books, and some others have shaped the way I look at leading and recommend everyone read them.  These books will share the way you look at leadership as well. Here are some other books that have influenced my personal development.

Improving Teaching Skills

We want to build people.  It is a worthy and noble thing to do. To get to watch people transform and playing a small part in that transformation is an amazing feeling.  

To be able to articulate a skill, philosophy or idea can change someone’s life.  The better we can share ideas, especially with those we work with, the better we can make our businesses.

Improving How You Deal With Difficult Situations

We are human and we all deal with difficult situations differently. Some of the ways we deal with difficult situations has been learned because we saw other folks deal with situations a certain way. 

Some of our responses are just frankly bad habits in regards to dealing with difficult situations.  

One thing I have learned in the past year is there will always be an EVENT that will happen. There will also be our RESPONSE to that event. And our RESPONSE to that EVENT many times can reflect the OUTCOME of that event.

So basically changing how we respond to different things in life can change the outcome (in a good way) if we choose to change the way we respond to different things in our lives.

Another way of thinking that has greatly impacted my life is having this philosophy.  “Why is this happening for me” instead of asking, “Why is this happening to me”. Can you imagine how that can change the way you look at things in your life?  Knowing that there is a potential reason the universe is allowing something uncomfortable or negative to happen. It’s a game changer to think that way.

For me, when certain struggles present themselves, I wonder why God is putting these things in front of me. What does God want me to learn?  How am I going to grow from those specific moments? When I think like that, I am less angry and less likely to feel sorry for myself.  

Building Better Habits 

Habits affect many of the things I have listed earlier and believe or not control so many of the things we do in life.  And the reasons habits take over in our life is because our brains can become very overwhelmed if it was running at a high level at every waking moment.

Driving is a habit. When we first started driving it was quite an experience. We were on high alert, trying to stay in our lane, checking our speed constantly and making sure we didn’t run anything over.  After a little while driving you don’t even think about the actions you take, you just do it. How many times have you driven and you don’t even remember how you got to your location. The habit of driving took over and you were there before you knew it.  

Well just like the example of driving, habits play parts in so many areas of our lives that we just do certain things without even thinking about it. Some habits are good and some habits are bad. Regardless of which they are, the bad habits can be changed.

One book to read is The Power of Habit.  This is an amazing well written book that shares incredible information about habits and how we can change them.  Check it out, you won’t regret the time reading it.

And More

To be truthful my brain doesn’t comprehend someone not chasing better or not wanting to become a better version of themselves.  Who wouldn’t want that? The truth is I believe in theory people want that but they don’t want to put in the work that is required to be better versions of themselves.

Sometimes the “work” is just picking up a book, listening to a book, watching a video that makes you aware of something that you might not have been aware of before.  

It is 2020 as I write this information is at our fingertips…literally because we have mini computers in our hands everyday. We can read books from our phones, we can listen to books through Audible, we can watch educational videos on Youtube and we can do many of these tasks while driving to work each day.

What if you learned and applied one thing to your life that ended up changing the direction of your life or even your career. Just learning one new thing can do that. 

So why not speed up your knowledge/personal development instead of waiting for some life event to happen to you just so you can learn it.  Why not learn things faster so you can have better relationships and move up in your company faster? Let us take action on some of this stuff and see what happens.  I am certain that if you spend any time on some of this stuff your life could be dramatically changed for the better.