As children, many people were taught that focusing on yourself was seen as being selfish, and they believed it. Understandably, they thought it was because ‘self’ is part of the word selfish. The latter term 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 why you need to prioritize self-improvement.
Self-Improvement
Whether it’s the fear of uncertainty, public speaking, or risk, all your fears keep you in the same position and prevent you from improving your life. Recognize that your fears reflect areas where you can grow as they act as a compass pointing at areas that need attention.
Self-Improvement Goals
Clarify Your 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.
Documenting your plan requires explaining the missing elements to reach the goal. For example, if your vision includes being happy and in good health; however, you eat burgers every day and never exercise. It would be best if you were realistic to be effective.
Change your Focus
Enhance Your Strengths
An effective self-development planfocuses 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 know. However, focusing on what you’re naturally good at and like to do is far more efficient.
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, focusing on your strengths will make you far more successful because it feels so good.
As you set goals and determine why you desire those goals, 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 give you 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 at each stage and area of your life. The principal factor is that the planning will explain why as you take each step toward the goal.
Growth is Essential
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 your 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. 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.
Finally, knowing 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 balanced when you’re honest about what it takes to do what you’ve prepared yourself to do.
Claiming these benefits is as easy as starting your self-improvement journeytoday by setting your intention and creating your self-development plan. The sooner you begin your journey of self-discovery, the sooner you can start taking massive action to realize all your dreams.
Every day of your life is a new opportunity. Whether you’re going through an upheaval, merely surviving, or bored, moving forward with your life is much more satisfying than simply “moving on.”
So, if you’re ready to move forward with your life like I am, follow these simple steps below:
Stop Expecting Easy
You may have heard the saying, “If it were easy, everyone would do it.” Unfortunately, many things in life are daunting. Self-development is one of those things. This is because there is a learning curve, and there may be challenges concerning maintaining steady progress, especially if you’re just getting started. I bet you thought life would be easy when you were a child. Then you grow up and discover that it’s much more complicated than you thought.
It’s not always easy to get to know who you are. Examine past traumas and experiences. Weed through your inner conflicts, and fight to become who you want to be. While this is not easy, it is a straightforward process that can lead you to succeed. And when you grow, you will feel like you can climb any mountain that gets in your way. Ask me, I know.
Expand your Knowledge
Stop Living in The Past
While you want to understand why you think and do certain things, avoid living in the past. Address the past by accepting that it happened. Work through your past by getting treatment for something negatively affecting your current situation. However, don’t allow yourself to live in the past because the contentment you seek is in the here and now.
When you focus on the present and learn from the past, you ensure that you’re well cared for. And when you do that, your future is almost certainly taken care of too. After all, the actions you take today to inform your future. All you can get from the past is a list of steps you took that worked versus actions you took that did not. Let the rest go.
How to Improve your Life
Stop Waiting for Perfection
If you’ve heard yourself described as a perfectionist, don’t take it as a compliment. It’s not. The best time to begin your next goal is now. There is no perfect outcome even if you follow your plans to a T. There is no time like now for getting started on anything you want to do. Find the worksheet I created for this to help you with your plans. Download it and fill it out. If you need help, I’m always available. Just set up a quick call with me here.
Instead of thinking thoughts like, “I’ll be happy when I reach my weight loss goal.” Or “I’ll start my business when my child is older.” Anytime you start a thought with “I’ll do this when…” stop yourself because most of the time, there is no real reason to put off your goals.
Stop Doubting
One way to squash doubt is to do your due diligence regarding research for all your goals. Here’s the thing, if it’s possible for someone, it’s probably also possible for you. There are very few cases where only one person can do something. You can learn anything and do whatever you want or at least something close to it. You need a plan of action and follow up on it step by step.
Plan Ahead
Start Planning and Doing
Once you let go of the fact that life can be challenging, and the past harmed you, and perfection and release yourself from doubt, you can start planning. You will feel better by learning to set goals in a way that leaves you with an innovative action plan that gets results. Then, use that plan to start the most critical thing in your life, the doing. Doing will move you forward more than anything else will.
After you let go of expectations and stop focusing on the impossible, you’ll see success. Once you create specific goals and follow your plan, you’ll finally start experiencing success. But don’t skip the very last step. You really must “do” to move forward in your life.
5 Reasons Why You Need a Personal Development Plan
Beginning today, we will begin a series of articles about creating a personal development plan. By the end of this series, you’ll have everything you need to make your plan for this year. So, let’s start with 5 reasons you need a personal development plan.
A personal development plan assists you in finding your purpose and developing your strengths. It also gives you the confidence to get out of your comfort zone. A good personal development plan will also help you improve your self-awareness. This combination will ensure you know your potential and live up to it with intention. Find your FREE worksheet at the bottom of this article.
Discover Your Purpose
On the road to self-discovery, most people want to know why they are here. If you want to know your purpose in life, focus on your personal development and create a written personal development plan to help you find it.
As you discover what makes you think the way you do, challenge your thoughts, and decide what facts you’ll use to make sound decisions. When you do this, you may come across additional information that will lead you closer to your purpose. You are more likely to feel good about your ideas and actions each day because you know they will have a particular impact.
Develop Your Strengths
Once you discover your strengths as you study yourself and pay close attention to how you feel about your actions, you’ll know what to develop. Focusing on what you are already good at is always preferable to focus on where you are lacking.
Getting additional training, practicing, and learning from others regarding the things you’re already good at doing is a much more pleasurable and successful way to approach your life. You’re naturally good at something that gives you joy and improves you. So, you may as well use your natural gifts.
Get Out of Your Comfort Zone
While you want to focus on what you are already good at, sometimes it takes time to see what that is. Getting out of your comfort zone has nothing to do with forcing yourself to focus on things you aren’t good at doing. Instead, it may mean simply showing someone else what you’re good at.
Boost Your Confidence
As you develop yourself, you’ll start experiencing success, and that experience will boost your confidence exponentially. Part of personal development is focusing on learning to have a positive mindset, taking the best care of yourself, and reveling in your skills and experience. When your confidence is strong, you’ll free yourself from paralyzing self-doubt, negative thoughts, and emotions. You can’t help but become strong when you craft and follow a plan based on self-discovery and your goals.
Improve Your Self-Awareness
Since personal development is about you, getting to know who you are is especially important. Knowing who you allow you to learn and lead with your strengths so that you can cope with your weaknesses realistically and kindly without lying to yourself or others about who you are. Self-awareness is the ultimate precursor to authenticity.
It would be best if you also had a personal development plan because you’re much more likely to succeed at anything when you have a plan. A personal development plan is a documented set of facts and information to help guide and direct you through the actions and habits that make up your life. For example, if you want to succeed in any dream, it starts with a goal. Then, through intelligent goal setting, your goals become a plan that you can follow, track, and even change throughout your life while remaining focused on your ultimate dreams and goals.
Use this worksheetto write out a simple plan you can start following today. Click on the words “this worksheet” to get your Free Copy Today.
Hello, my friends & business associates. So this year, I’m doing something a little different for the end of the year. I’m doing a Holiday Story Promo for all my fans on the internet. And no, I’ve never done this before, so it will be interesting to see how it works.
Here’s how the Holiday Story Promo will work:
Write your favorite holiday story on a word document or in an email. Send it to me Here. This is my email address. The deadline for the Holiday Story Promo submission is January 25th, 2023. After I’ve read all the stories, I will select one (1) winner. The winner will receive a $50.00 gift card to Amazon.
Holiday Story Promo Submission Rules:
The deadline for submission is January 25th, 2023, no later than midnight pacific time.
It must be emailed to me @ linda@lindahenslee.com.
The story must be at least 3000 – 5000 words long.
The story must be positive and show me love & encouragement. Nothing negative or depressing.
The winner will be announced by February 1st, 2023, by email.
In your submission, you must include your correct email address so that your gift card can be emailed to you if you’re the winner.
That’s it! I hope you are the lucky person picked for the winning submission for the Holiday Story Promo. Remember…it’s all up to you to make it the best story! I can’t wait to read them; oh, and one more thing. The winner will also receive the Amazon Gift Card, and the story will be shared here on my blog for everyone to read.
That is going to be amazing!! I’m so excited to read all the beautiful stories you write, my friends. So get your stories written and submitted by the deadline. It’s January 25th, 2023.
Did you know there are two distinct styles of doing business — a man’s way and a woman’s way? Neither is wrong or right. But this information could make a huge difference when writing a business email, starting a new project, or even making a pitch. This article is all about this question, how do you do business in today’s world?
People often tell me that in business my approach is pretty direct. I usually get straight to the point in meetings. I want to know the important information and whether we can do something or not. That’s called a man’s way of doing business. I learned this method when I worked in the Corporate World, otherwise, you were never heard, being a woman. But, I can also change my style when the situation requires me to.
Here’s the Nitty Gritty on business:
A woman’s way of doing business involves talking about things at length. You have to communicate differently with a woman and discuss how things could /should work. She loves to be asked, “What do you think about this idea?” She usually comes at things with her “emotional side“.
There have been times when I got into strife by treating someone like a man when they wanted to do business as a woman. As soon as I realized this, I changed my approach and asked them how they were doing, what they did over the weekend, or how they felt about the project we were working on. And our communications changed immediately.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re actually a woman or a man. In any workplace, you’ll come across men who like a woman’s way of doing business and women who do business like a man.
So look around at the people you work with. Do they do business like a man or like a woman? What about you? Do you prefer a man’s way or a woman’s way?
Use this awareness to have more fun in your business
Here are 3 additional tools to add to your repertoire.
Women, you don’t have to be a bitch
I’ve come across women who have decided that they can only succeed by being big, bad, tough businesswomen. That’s simply not true! Women can be great manipulators in business. Ha, is this YOU?
Manipulation is considered crafty or even deceitful, and that’s one definition of the word. It also means handling a situation easily and skillfully —that’s the kind of manipulation I’m talking about. When I see women operate as if they’re nasty or mean, I’m tempted to say, “Do you know how easy things would be for you if you used a little manipulation?” Are you one of these types of Business Women?
Even when people know you’re manipulating them, it still works in business
What if you could have fun with manipulation?
Never confront
Asking someone questions is a great manipulation. A question is designed to dissolve any conclusions you might have and create a totally different outcome. It also allows the other person to give you feedback and ask their own questions.
If there’s a difficult conversation to be had with someone, the first thing I say to them is: “I’m confused. Can you help me with this?”
If you force a confrontation, people have to fight you. No, not by using fists!
SAY WHAT?
When you say you need help, perhaps because you missed something, the other person will try to fill in the blanks; they will try to help you.
This tool really works!
What you’re looking for are greater clarity and more awareness. It’s not about right or wrong or winning and losing.
The only time confrontation may be helpful is when you desire to control a situation or to end a relationship.
Men, you don’t have to be the commander-in-chief!
As I mentioned, a man’s way of doing business is quite direct. Many men have been taught that they have to give and follow orders.
They think they have to be the authority at all times and people should simply do as they’re told. This approach can lead to blind followers and that’s something you don’t want in your business. Do you really want that?
Invite the peopleyou work with tocontribute to your business
Every person in your company or business has a different perspective and their own awareness. So are YOU willing to tap into that? I’ve noticed that entrepreneurs rarely act like “commanders-in-chief“.
Their usual approach is, “What does this person know and what can they contribute?” Entrepreneurs constantly ask questions about every aspect of a business.
You can only do business as a man or a woman, but that could limit what’s truly possible in your business. Use this information to have ease of communication.
What if changing how you do business is as easy as changing your clothes?
Hit me up in the comments below and let me know what your opinion is!
