As teachers, we're taught that we are sacrificing ourselves for the good of the children, and as women, we're taught that focusing on ourselves is being selfish. And many of us believed this until it started affecting our actual physical or mental health. Or until we realized we couldn't successfully run our our business until we paid attention to ourselves. Perhaps we believed that focusing on ourselves is bad because ‘self’ is part of the word selfish. The latter word which means, “…lacking consideration for others.” The good news is that self-improvement is not selfish. On the contrary, self-improvement is good for you and society.
Self-discovery, development, and improvement need to be a rite of passage for all adults simply because it’s so helpful and, simply put, develops valuable people. Plus, the benefits of continuous lifelong self-improvement are all the reasons you need to prioritize self-improvement.
Clarify Your Self-Improvement Vision
As you plan your personal development, it helps to envision what you want your future to look like. Some people find it helpful to write their obituary and mention each area of their life, as they want it to be. They need to think of it as if they got everything they ever wanted, and all their dreams came true.
If writing your own obituary seems a bit too morbid, just write down your vision for your life. Part of documenting your plan requires explaining the missing elements to arrive at the goal. For example, if your vision includes being happy and in good health, but you eat burgers every day and you never exercise, you're going to need to plan the steps to get from where you are now to your goal of being healthy. You need to be realistic to be effective.
Enhance Your Strengths
An effective self-development plan focuses on strengths over weaknesses. It’s not that you will ignore your weaknesses. You won’t. You can outsource, delegate, automate, and learn anything you want to learn. However, it’s far more efficient to focus on what you’re naturally good at and like to do.
Your personal development plan requires you to perform a SWOT analysis for each area of your life to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that may exist. Therefore, if you focus on your strengths, you’ll be far more successful because it feels so good.
Find Your Purpose
As you set goals and determine why you desire that goal, the process will lead you to discover your purpose. It may not be your life purpose because that may change as you learn and grow. However, it can supply you with a reason to keep looking for your life purpose. The continued search gives you the energy to keep going. Of course, your reasons may differ for at each stage of life and area of your life. The principal factor is that the planning will explain why as you take each step toward the goal.
Improve Your Mental Health
It feels good to understand yourself. For example, knowing why you are afraid of loud sounds can help you deal with the feelings when you hear loud sounds. Being self-aware enough to note problems with your mental health will also make it more likely that you stay healthy because you will be more likely to seek professional help if you need it. If there is one thing personal development does well is to keep you self-aware.
Create Strong Relationships
Learning what your thoughts and feelings mean to you and how your actions affect others goes a long way toward building super-strong relationships. Whether friends or family managing your emotions and moderating your behavior turns you into someone viewed as safe and stable. In addition, being someone trustworthy helps others bond with you more.
Make Every Moment Count
Finally, just knowing for sure what you want and how you’ll get it makes all the difference when you get it. It’s so much easier to schedule your life in a balanced way when you’re honest about what it takes to do the things you’ve scheduled yourself to do.
Claiming these benefits is as easy as starting on your self-improvement journey today by setting your intention by beginning creating your self-development plan. The sooner you begin your journey of self-discovery, the sooner you can start taking massive action on realizing all your dreams.
Take Time to Relax
Maybe you love mowing the lawn or knitting. Perhaps reading a good book is your jam. Whatever it is that you enjoy doing, that takes you out of your own head and helps you feel good is something you should make sure you do for a few minutes every day.
Personally, I love reading, so right before I go to bed, I read a novel for 15-20 minutes on my phone. Right now, I have a 130 week streak going in my Kindle app!
If you're not sure what you like to do, or you already know you like coloring and you have some crayons, colorful pencils or markers lying around your house, check out this coloring page.
Not Stopping Coloring Page
Coloring pages can help you relax. Think of them as a form of art therapy, which has been proven to help people cope with depression, anxiety, addictions, trauma, and other conditions.
Just click the button below and sign up for your free page.
