How to Achieve Personal Growth
Katy Reid
Many of the most influential business people put great emphasis on pursuing professional growth and advancement. Despite being at the height of their career, they still find the time to broaden their horizons and unleash even more of their inner potential.
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So what is the essence of “personal growth?” What is the definition of personal growth? How can you tell when you’ve achieved it? Personal growth is a psychological, emotional, social, and spiritual growth mechanism that happens over an entire lifetime.
The power of personal development resides in its limitless potential. You can develop skills in numerous areas that pique your curiosity, and go as far and in-depth as you want. By continually striving to increase your strengths, achievements, and curiosity, you’ll be on the road to living an exceptional and fulfilling life.
In this blog, we’ll give some personal growth examples and tips, explore various areas of personal growth, and look at how you can set yourself on a path to becoming your better self.
Personal Growth Tips: Understanding Your Strengths and Weaknesses
Everybody is good at something, but no one is good at everything–and that’s okay! Having our own strengths and weaknesses makes us unique. It’s essential to have a good understanding of your abilities and capacities to identify personal growth goals that make sense for you.
Your talents are tools that you can maximize to help propel yourself forward. Your shortcomings, on the other hand, are not your downfall. These are areas that you can improve and build on instead of considering them deficiencies. The first step in achieving personal growth is knowing what these areas are so you can begin the work.
It can be a powerful and inspiring practice to visualize performance, so take a little time to do it now. How will the improvement of any of your weaknesses enhance your life and your career? For example, assume you have a problem with being on time. This can be a weakness, and it can make you look unreliable and flaky.
One of the advantages of reversing this pattern is that you are going to come off as more dependable and attentive, simply by having self-awareness and putting forth the effort. This is great for interpersonal relationships, but sticking with these changes and making a point to see them through, is when you achieve personal growth.
When you understand what’s not working and make the adjustments, this will benefit your career and personal life in the long run. Personal growth is not achieved in a set amount of time, it is an active process. As humans, we are always growing and looking for ways to better ourselves. This means, that our strengths and weaknesses are also ever-changing. Keeping in touch with yourself will ensure you stay on the right track to becoming the best you.
Personal Growth Tips: Celebrate Every Achievement, Small or Large
Taking a break from working on yourself to recognize when you’ve hit a milestone is vital to staying motivated. If you allow yourself to dwell on lack of progress or mistakes, you’re not only hurting your mindset but limiting your potential in the process.
Demotivation can come because we are unaware of how far our goals are from us. We mistakenly assume that while the end may really be just around the corner, it is still too far away, something we would never realize if we gave up. Across all the areas of personal growth, there’s one thing that’s true: It’s never possible to truly know just how close you are.
Therefore, making sure you enjoy your milestones (big or small) along the way is crucial to your success. Recognizing these milestones provides and reinforces positive feedback loops and releases hormones that give us the feeling of pride. It also supplies us with the motivation to want our next success. Celebrating small wins leads to achieving big goals.
Personal Growth Tips: Be (and Stay) Curious
Curiosity is at the root of all knowledge. There is no development, innovation, or expansion without the desire to learn and understand. Curiosity inspires inventiveness and imagination. It inspires us to move beyond our fears and achieve. In fact, one of the best barometers that you’ve burnt out of a job, career, or project is a loss of curiosity. So one of the biggest areas of personal growth you can find success in is in pumping up your curiosity.
When we’re faced with the potential to learn something new, how do we make sure we take full advantage of the opportunity? Approach it with unbridled curiosity. This means being open to learn, unlearn, and relearn. It means asking questions and eliminating assumptions.
But what does this look like? What are some real personal growth examples that leverage this curiosity? For you, it looks like exploring whatever it is that draws you in—read that book about space, attend that cooking webinar, Google those weird and interesting questions you have. You will come back with a larger wealth of information as your intuition leads you into the unknown. You’ll stretch your mind’s limits. The more you absorb and learn, the more it will make you want to know. You will be guided to another stimulating task by any new knowledge.
You’ll surely lose curiosity if you just embrace the universe as it is without question. Don’t believe everything you hear and read, try digging deeper under the surface of what’s around you, and then take it inward.
Ask yourself:
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What makes you wonder?
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What drives you?
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What challenges you?
Develop a “Curiosity Inventory.” List out all these things in your tool of choice, be it a paper journal, a software tool, a vision board, etc. Then make a plan to investigate them over time. Some may turn out to be dead ends, some may become lifetime journeys.
Personal Growth Tips: Aim for Progression, not Perfection
Having the right mindset and perspective of your goals and where you are in relation to them is crucial. If you strive for perfection, and perfection only, you will never be able to see or appreciate how far you’ve come.
Yes, to a certain degree, having a perfectionist mentality can have its place, however, overdoing it can become a disservice to yourself and the people around you. Continuously assess your growth, not the goal. This will help remind you that you’ve come a long way from where you started, and progress is an achievement in itself!
The most common reason people strive for perfection instead of progress and growth is the fear of judgment or failure. This can cause you to become your own worst enemy, taking away your inspiration to try new things. Here’s how to combat these fears and self-doubt. Remember that receiving more feedback will make you more resilient to receiving criticism—ask people to tell you what they think! The truth is that they’re actually going to be more helpful than you thought, or give you the motivation to prove them wrong. Becoming comfortable with hearing others’ thoughts, good or bad, is a surefire way to ensure you’re making progress.
Having a fear of failure can be very exhausting. One remedy here is to foster a mentality of development, where you assume that there is no failure, only learning. Remember that you can trust yourself—even though you may sometimes fail. Trust that the abilities you possess are adequate to get you through whatever obstacles you encounter. And that other people will support you, too, if your talents don’t quite get you there.
To conclude this point, when change feels sluggish, stop beating yourself up. Instead, focus on making a slight improvement each day. Minor but consistent positive adjustments will eventually add up and get you where you want to be. Progress, not perfection, is the only way to bridge the gap between your ability and your ambition.
Summary
Having this knowledge combined with self-awareness will establish a realistic understanding of yourself and how to continuously propel yourself forward. We all have felt like we’re taking one step forward and two steps back at times, however understanding that this is normal and that it is still considered progress is this difference between growth and decay. Crave knowledge, understand no one is perfect, make progress and celebrate your little victories along the way! You will now be able to know what inspires you, obtain the tools to set yourself up for success, and ultimately, have a better outlook on life, guaranteed.
Everybody is accountable for their own personal growth. If you commit to taking steps, make a strategy to fulfill your tasks, and keep yourself accountable, you will certainly begin to see significant improvements within yourself in no time. The path to self-improvement is a life-long process.
