Personal Development and Growth

You will become what you think about most.  This is a powerful statement when it comes to your personal development and growth.  What you think about most becomes the foundation for building your confidence and self-esteem.  And, what you think about most can help to improve your self-confidence or it can diminish it.  So, what are you thinking about most?

As a business coach, who also plays the role of a personal development coach, it is not necessarily easy to answer the question, “What do you think about most?”

I find a way to get something complex and deep started is to simplify it.  It is important to break it down into manageable pieces.  Let’s take a look at what I like to call the 5 Areas of Life.

  1. Spiritual-The spiritual is about how much you are conducting your life in alignment with your gifts and talents, who you are. If you are not, don’t panic or beat up on yourself.  This doesn’t mean that you don’t have a good life.  You probably do.  What it means is, that when you are living your life using your gifts and talents that you and your life will be happier and more fulfilling.  That definitely builds your confidence and self-esteem.
  2. Family-How is your relationship with your family? This is critical. Poor relationships will drain you of energy, focus and the desire to expand yourself and your world.  It is important to get this as right as possible.  It is hard to have build confidence and self-esteem in a constant cauldron of negative relationships.
  3. Business-This is what you do to earn a living. Or, what you do to exist.  The goal here is to be doing things that not only let you survive, but thrive.  An environment where you thrive will accelerate your personal development and growth.
  4. Financial-This is pretty straight forward. Have your income exceed your expenses.  Be a good steward of your money.  And, if you aren’t earning enough money, even if you have good financial habits, you can embark on personal development and growth, which will increase your value and put the odds in your favor of finding something where you will be paid more.  Actually, in the United States, this is the easiest area to change.
  5. Personal-This has three sub areas: The Mental.  The Emotional.  The Physical.  This is the area where you recharge yourself.  When you recharge yourself by focusing your mind on good things and progress, by feeling good about yourself and what you are doing then you are much more likely to create new pathways for your successful personal development and growth and ultimately your successful performance.  The last area, the Physical, is very important to supporting the mental and emotional.  When you feel good about yourself physically it is because you are doing good things for yourself.  The physical serves as an impetus to build your confidence and self-esteem in your thoughts and emotions.  The physical acts as a reservoir that the mental and emotional can draw on.  Take care of the reservoir of the physical and you will have the energy to become all that you can be.

These are five areas that you can focus on to take your personal development and growth to the next level.  Let them guide you to what you think about most.  After all, you do become what you think about most.

The Stages of Team Building

The Tuckman-Jensen analysis of the stages of team building has become a foundational piece in understanding how teams come together or pull apart, how they perform well or fail to meet desired results.

Tuckman and Jensen state that teams go through five stages of team development:

1. Forming—the search for commonalities

2. Storming-breaking away from false harmony into individual power displays, leading to rifts between team members. There is a tension in this stage between unity and individualism.

3. Norming-behavior in this stage is more about consensus between team members and more of a shift from “I” to “We.” Read more

The Formula For Success

One of the questions we must answer to have greater success in business and life is this:

How can we change the errors in the formula for failure into the disciplines required in the formula for success? The answer is by making the future part of our current philosophy.

Both success and failure involve future consequences, namely inevitable rewards or unavoidable regrets resulting from past activities.

So what do we need to do daily to be on the path to success? We must develop the discipline to look down the road every day. Read more

Attitude

Attitudes are affected by what we know since what we know determines he decisions we will make. Where our philosophy deals with the logical side, our attitude focuses primarily on emotional issues.

What we know determines our philosophy. What we feel determines our attitude. Here is the key point to remember. In business and life it is our emotional nature that governs most of our daily conduct in our personal and business worlds.

I have heard many well intentioned people say to others: “Be more logical. Don’t be so emotional.” That’s an interesting statement. Interesting because there is a strong emotion attached to it. Be more logical. Read more

Culture and Change

When culture and change meet, culture always wins.

Lasting success lies in changing individuals first; then the organization follow. And organization changes only as far or as fast as its collective individual change.

To strategically change your organization, you must first change the individuals. Too often, change fails because we don’t start with the individuals.

To change, individuals within an organization have to redraw their mental maps. If people are not remapped then they cannot break through the brain barrier of exchanging the old, familiar way of doing things and embrace the new, change. Read more

What Never Goes Out Of Style?

What Never Goes Out Of Style“During my 87 years I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think.”-Bernard Baruch. It is your choice to build your character and your ability to think. They are critical to your success and happiness. Character and the ability to think are always in style.

In today’s world automation and artificial intelligence are allowing machines to do tasks once performed by human beings. Will the need for human beings to have good character and to think go away?

No. Human beings will have to have both of these to have good relationships. Without relationships there would be no need for personal development and growth in the areas of character and thinking. Without relationships, there would be no need to add value to yourself. Read more

Stop Drinking The Poison

love yourself“When you truly love yourself, you don’t have enemies. They may hate you but you’re too big to hate them back.” — Tony Gaskins. When you love yourself, you understand that hate is self-destructive. Hate is like drinking poison and hoping that the other person dies.

There is a huge opportunity for self improvement in truly understanding that you must love yourself first. When you do, hate starts to fade away. How do you go about doing this?

Self improvement, or personal development, is about how to change your habits to become the person you wish to be. When you start loving yourself more the consequence is that there is less room for hate. You love yourself more by finding the good in every person or situation, no matter how distasteful.

Practice being a “good finder.” When you do, you will be practicing gratitude. And gratitude is the first step in the path of how to change your life for the better. Hate cannot flourish in an atmosphere of love and gratitude. Read more