Your Personal Development Journey Starts with One Simple Truth
What’s the key to real growth and success? It all starts with one simple truth: No one is more responsible for your development than you. You will have mentors, leaders, and experiences that shape your journey, but at the end of the day, you are the one who must take ownership. You must seek the learning. You must have the drive to grow. No one else can make you develop the skills, knowledge, or mindset needed to reach your full potential. Learning is an active participation and full engagement activity. You must choose to do it.
Developing yourself can be one of the most rewarding experiences you will have in your life and career. Many people think back to school and may not be excited about the idea of learning. After all, you’re getting plenty of information on the job, and you seem to be doing fine. Learning and growth is an ongoing journey that can be pretty adventurous. You’ll have many stops along the way. You’ll see exciting things. You’ll also experience new environments and meet interesting people. Self-development learning is different from school learning; YOU select the content. Often, you are both the teacher and the student. You create your own lesson plans as you go.
There are many avenues to explore when creating your journey. The resources that are available today for our development are nearly endless and accessible to almost anyone. There is something for every learning style or preference. You can choose to read. You can find online courses or even universities if you do like the school learning environment. There are videos you can watch or audiobooks and podcasts to listen to. All those are great resources that will help in your development.
"Your life does not get better by chance, it gets better by change. And change begins with you." — Jim Rohn
Here are three things to help get you started on your personal development journey.
Schedule Dedicated Time
Schedule it. Make it regular. Your personal development journey has to be something you make specific time for. Find a day each week that you can spend 30-60-90 minutes to dedicate to your development. Put it on your schedule. This is something that should not be seen as ‘easy to move’ or change. This is a firm day and time that you have a meeting with yourself. Ensure you select that time so that you will keep it. If you have a varying work schedule, plan out when you will complete your development time each week after your work schedule is posted. Or, if you know there are regular times you will not work, then use that time each week for yourself. The important part is that you dedicate the time. You put it on the schedule and make it a regularly recurring event. Leverage your calendar or other scheduling tools that can help ensure you never lose sight of your development time.
Make Notes and Review Them
Keep a development journal as a way to capture the information you are reviewing or learning about and your thoughts along the way. It can be as simple as copying and pasting passages from a book or article you read online. It could be bookmarking specific sites that you want to come back to. It could handwriting notes in a dedicated notebook. Ensure you have a way of capturing your ideas and thoughts about what you are engaging in. Then, every so often, review those notes. Re-engage the senses from that moment to reinforce the learning that came from that. Capture any new notes or thoughts you have. This would be especially true if you took any of that information and put it to use in your life or job. What were the outcomes? What did you change? What else did you learn? Capture and review to exercise your ‘learning muscle.’ There are a ton of new applications that allow you to capture your thoughts and then summarize them with AI. Otter.ai is a way to speak your notes, transcribe them, and then get them summarized. Simple tools like Apple Notes will also allow you to capture your thoughts and now have Apple Intelligence help with summarizing what you have written down. Take full advantage of these tools.
Track Your Progress
Your notes can also serve as a progress report. Your journey will never have a final destination, but you will have milestones along the way. What did you set out to achieve for yourself in this stage? Keep track for yourself; how are you doing? There is no right or wrong. This is just for you. Tracking your progress should serve to energize your next stage. It can be recognition for what you have accomplished or motivation for what you still want to achieve. Once you build a rhythm to your learning journey, tracking will be a simple exercise that can be done with every review session you have. Know where you have been and what your next step will be. Button line: track your progress.
Your personal development journey should be fun. If it is becoming a chore, revisit what you are setting out to achieve and why. Check in with your mentor or supervisor to gauge the path you are on. The learning you do for yourself is personal and 100% in your control, so ensure you are enjoying it. If you need to change the destination, the course, or the stops along the way, then do so. You are the most important person in your development. This is YOUR journey.
Where will you begin your personal development journey?
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