6 Ways to Improve Your Personal Development Skills

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Your personal development has to come first for you to excel in different facets of life. You must take it as an ongoing activity with which you continue to assess your life, values, and goals and build your qualities and skills to help you achieve your potential. This will help you mature, be successful and attain satisfaction in life. Working on your personal development skill is something that you can do all your life to ensure that you reach your goals. It can come through your education, self-help, counsel from a mentor, etc.

It’s impossible to talk about personal development without mentioning the skills you are imbibing in your development. These characteristics and qualities are the factors that help you grow as a person and as a professional. These skills nurture a person’s development. So, improving these skills and using them to reach your potential is what personal development is all about.

Some examples of personal development skills are communication skills, leadership skills, organization skills, interpersonal skills, productivity, adaptability, self-confidence, problem-solving skills, work ethic, and integrity.

Why these skills are important

With personal development skills, you’re able to build a tactical and strategic plan for professional and personal growth to help you achieve your goals. You must hone these skills to find them easier to use and take advantage of them for your career advancement, reach your individual and career goals, improve your talents and strengths, get better, find satisfaction and fulfillment.

How to improve your personal development skills

In order to build yourself and your personal development skills, there are certain things that you must do. Some of these are discussed below:

1. Get a mentor

Getting yourself a mentor is one of the fastest ways to grow personally and in your career. Although, in most cases, people use mentors that are far older than them, have more experience, and are more knowledgeable about many things that affect them. However, the truth is, your mentor can be anybody. It can be your mate or someone in the same peer group as young. The critical factor is that the mentor has more knowledge and experience (this is why it’s mostly older people), and they are willing to work with you, counsel you and guide you while you work with them or for them in exchange.

2. Read

Being a reader opens you up to a whole new world and helps you find knowledge about so many things in books. So fasting is also one of the ways to improve your personal development. To be more effective, you should read about those things that you are trying to improve. For instance, if you’re working on improving your leadership skills or quality, read books about leadership by different authors.

Reading not only expands your knowledge but also keeps you informed and builds your vocabulary. It also helps to stimulate the mind to develop and grow critical thinking skills. You can help yourself by setting a goal to read several books monthly or daily.

In reading, make sure that you are meditative. Also, go for very explanatory books. Whatever skill you want to improve, productivity, confidence, spontaneity, etc., some books cover all of these, and reading them helps to put the skill or characteristic on your mind. This makes it easier to practice the things that you learn while reading.

3. Face your fears

One of the biggest hindrances to personal growth is fear. When you live in fear, you will be held back and won’t be able to do the things that would help you grow. So, you must face that fear before it becomes a hindrance to your progress and growth. For instance, if you are scared of public speaking, you should join a class or group where you can learn to speak better in public places. If you don’t take risks out of fear, you should get yourself a mentor to help you make good decisions and build confidence in taking calculated risks. The point is that you need to grow, and this would involve learning to do things that you are usually not comfortable doing. You need to face that fear. There is no growth in your comfort zone. So do what you need to do even if you hate to do it or don’t like to do it. Learn it. Face it.

4. Develop a punishment/reward system

This is an excellent strategy to ensure your personal growth. It works best for people that are trying to break off or stop a bad habit. Creating milestones one after the other and rewarding yourself when you meet up or punishing yourself when you fail would make a lot of difference. You’ll find that sooner or later, one step at a time, you are getting better and developing yourself.

5. Get people’s feedback

Getting feedback from people is very important when you are trying to grow. If you have people around you, especially if they’ve been around before you start your personal development journey, ask them for feedback. Be it a friend, colleague, family member, your mentors, ask for their thoughts and opinions about you or a project you just accomplished. Take their feedback as constructive criticism and look for ways to get better. The truth is you always need someone from the outside to give an unbiased assessment of your progress.

6. Be honest with yourself

There is no change when you talk about something without doing anything. The real change comes from the actions that you take. If you want to grow, then you must be honest with yourself first. You can devise everyone with actions they think you are taking but not yourself. So what are you doing? Are you just carrying that book on personal development around for show without reading it? Judge yourself first before you even ask for feedback from other people.

Conclusion

Personal development is critical to help you live a good life, be successful, and feel accomplished. So you must take your personal development seriously by paying attention to your personal development skills and looking for ways to cultivate and improve them.