Happy New Year! Personal growth comes when you have reached milestones. You overcome, mature, see and validate what before was challenges, obstacles, stress, negativity or lifestyle issues. To make personal growth part of your 2017 plans you don’t have to make a long list. New year’s resolutions are broken too often. Set a few achievable goals instead. Check out our best tips for making the new year your special gift to yourself. It comes with the added bonus that those around you will reward you too. Wonder how? Read on for more.
Personal Growth: What Is It?
Personal growth and development is a transformational process, which involves all aspects of life and work. It is an improvement in your physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, social and/or financial state.
Have you set any goals for the New Year yet? If you think about it you probably have issues that you would like to tackle, or wishes for a healthier way of life. Maybe you want to take your career in a new direction, or finally deal with all that paperwork that seems to clutter up your space? Is your relationship with your loved-ones or your team where they should be? Maybe you feel insecure how to go about perceived conflicts?
Personal development is not some ‘hippie’ theory, but a very real way to approach life and work. You need to get over yourself, and act. Un-learn and learn. The process isn’t always easy, but you come out stronger and enable yourself to deal with challenges in a different way.
Personal Growth and Life skills
You achieve growth though the development of life skills.
These life skills are necessary for successfully living a productive and satisfying life. They generally fall into one of several categories: feeling about self, intimacy, family, friends, community, job, leisure, and spirituality. They include being able to recognise and describe one’s feelings, giving and receiving feedback, recognising assumptions, setting realistic and attainable goals, and employing problem-solving strategies.
A personal growth process is often triggered by an important life event that inspires you to improve and empower yourself by discovering where your full potential lies. The result is a more satisfying and meaningful life, which is evident in your relationships, place of work, self-image and self-confidence, as well as your worldview. Can the New Year be your trigger?
Your Personal Growth Success
All in all you want to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. You set about becoming a self-realised human being. There is no recipe or method that works for all, as personal growth is just that: personal.
The overall goal is to develop positive life skills, and a realistic and healthy self-esteem. You develop coping mechanisms that allow you to tackle challenges. This in turn gives you stability and a sense of achievement. Tip: Read: What Is Personal Development – myrkothum.com
In the process of personal development there are specific milestones to reach. Start off by setting goals and developing a plan. It is a necessary process, as growth is not really possible or at least not complete without it. You can get help thru coaching, but for the most part self-improvement will mean tackling niggling issues on your own. Tip: Check out the recommended books below.
Have you looked yourself in the mirror lately? Are there issues, areas, challenges that you need to face?
If you are in the end-of-year frame of mind, the time to look back to move on has come. 2017 can be the year you transform. You define what you need, and what your goals are. No-one but you hold the keys to your personal growth success. The basic starting points is what The GOODista gives you here. Read on to see how.
Personal Growth: Look Back to Move On
To make changes you need a plan. This will enable you to alter how you live, work, eat, move, and your overall approach to relationships. For the most part a personal development plan will start by assessing a few home truths. You will look back to move forward. Acceptance is a key word.
Perhaps you can identify how your parents have influenced your thinking, and allow yourself to see that they were not always right? Growing up means separating yourself from childhood ideas, and developing your own. You draw a line in the sand, and choose to start afresh. A new day, a new dawn…
You can also start by looking at basics such as food and fitness. Lifestyle changes means that you consider that health is important, and as such prevention will become an ally. You tackle the very basics of how you eat, move and think about what is good for you.
One way to tackle a personal development plan is to learn more about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Consider each level and see where your needs are.
Level Up
Abraham Maslow (1908–1970), proposed a hierarchy of needs with self actualisation at the top, defined as:
… the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.
The interesting part about the ‘hierarchy of needs’ is how you have to complete one level before you can move on to the next. It is not evident that everyone is able to develop thru the entire pyramid. It has little to do with the luck of the draw — rather on your ability to change.
Once you accept where you are, and set initial goals you realise soon enough that you have strengths and weaknesses, as well as a range of skills that you use in your daily life. However, are you able to truly value how good you are, and where you need to develop? Is it time to set up a plan for your new year?
Setting your 2017 plan can mean considering your lifestyle choices. Your priority can also be to increase your sense of self-esteem, confidence and worth. Each of these areas are defined in the pyramid.
By using each level of the hierarchy of needs you can dot down a few achievable goals for 2017. Before your know it you are on the path to self-actualisation — which involves being in touch with your feelings, experiencing life fully and with total concentration.
Personal Growth: Do, or Do Not.
Every new year we tend to think over where we have been and where we want to go. New years resolutions are easily broken. How about if you commit to make 2017 the year when you move in a new direction? Let go of what was, and truly change for good?-“Nah!” You say, – “It’s not possible!”
Growing means leaving things behind, and re-learning how to define yourself. If you look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs you will soon see that each level speaks to you in different ways. How you interpret it is up to you, but it should trigger questions that lead you to define your home truths.
5 Questions for 5 Levels
- Are you really leading a healthy life? Moving your body, and nourishing it the way it deserves feeds a healthy body and mind. There is no way around the excuses, and therefore the sooner you take charge of how you eat and move the better you will feel.
- Do you feel safe and secure? If you fear your basic safety you will not be able to move on confidently, nor develop. Take measures to get your desk, insurances, last will and testament and legal issues sorted. They will not go away by looking at them. Are you happy in your job, or is a career move on the cards. You need to feel satisfied with your income level, job and overall level of responsibility. Often help is right around the corner, but to take that first step is a necessary beginning. Tip: Career Coaching
- How are your relationships doing? If you have unresolved issues with your team, or your loved-ones, your frame of mind will not allow you to concentrate fully. Getting to grips with childhood issues that include parents, siblings and friends can be tricky. Take steps to turn the page by seeking counselling, or communicate in a different way. Learning how to love again, and move forward, in a relationship with a partner takes two. Can 2017 be the year that you seize the moment and listen — as well as get heard?
- Are you respecting yourself, and do you get the respect you deserve? Self-esteem, confidence and worth is at the core of personal growth — and by taking steps to set achievable goals to change you are on the road to new frontiers.
- Are you reaching your full potential as a unique human being? The new year means new opportunities to enrol in cooking, painting, flying or pilates classes — or simply be when you allow yourself to do more with less. In other words: You set out to experience life fully with total concentration.
If this sounds all very ‘out there’ you can also take a more relaxed approach and dot down whatever comes to mind. The main point is to set some goals and stick to a few golden rules that you set. You are the master of your journey – and only you can decide to change.
Tip: Read: 13 Things You Have To Give Up To Become Successful – medium.com
Personal Growth: Live Long and Prosper
Personal empowerment is about looking at who you are, and becoming more aware of yourself as a unique individual. When you take control of your life you make positive choices and set achievable goals. Taking steps to set and achieve goals – both short and longer-term and developing new skills, acts to increase confidence which, in itself, is essential to self-empowerment.
Developing self-awareness, an understanding of your strengths and weaknesses – knowing your own limitations is key to personal empowerment. You will be growing on a personal level, and enable yourself to live a more peaceful life with fulfilling responses to whatever is thrown at you.
Maslow says that all individuals have the need to see themselves as ‘competent and autonomous’, and also that every person has limitless room for growth. His final and ultimate level is self-actualisation which refers to the wish everybody has ‘to become everything that they are capable of becoming’. In other words, it refers to self-fulfilment and the need to reach full potential as a unique human being. A captivating thought, isn’t it?
How about starting your path to a ‘new you’? Tip: Check out these books that come with some excellent tips, hints and how-to guides:
Personal Growth: In A Galaxy Not So Far Away
You can decide to moan, grown, get caught up in every day dramas, gossip, feed into negativity or change. The choice is yours. It is so very easy to continue down the road of grey submission.
Ask yourself who you are fooling? Ultimately it isn’t the fault of anybody else, nor will playing the blame-game make things different. By taking steps to change a habit you take steps towards self-control. One little routine can be altered — which impact so many other aspects of life and work.
When you look at the galaxy that is 2017 you can choose to be angry at world politics, climate change, WiFi connections and those around you. Or – you can approach your new year in a galaxy not so far away: YOU!
You hold the keys to your own success, but you do need to address a few home truths. Get some of the recommended self-improvement books and actually read them. Step by step you will get closer a more confident, self assured and healthier person. This person isn’t very different from who you are now. S/he is however happier, calmer and more enabled to tackle life and work.
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What a thoughtful and deeply felt post, thank you. It is up to me and everybody else to follow your very sound and wise advice.
Dear Goodista, What a thoughtful and deeply felt post, thank you. It is up to me and everybody else to follow your very sound and wise advice.
Happy New Year!
Thank you! Glad you found the post about personal growth inspirational, and how you can make your 2017 extra special. Happy ‘New You’ year!