Achieving any level of sustainable success in life requires you to commit to a lifelong process of growth and development. Your personal development relates to any new knowledge, ability or skill you will introduce into your life, which will better equip you to achieve the outcomes or results you desire. Anything, which expands your horizons or makes you better in any way, from a cooking course you, may attend or a journey to a country, where you can experience new culture, is contributing to your personal growth. The process I am offering you below will help you to get the most from any personal development program you may want to follow.
Crucial Elements for Success
There are three crucial components, which need to be in place, so that you can get the maximum from any personal development program.
1. Consistency
2. Patience
3. Teach What you are Learning
Consistency
Sustainable success is the result of consistently taking small almost insignificant actions every day. These tiny actions over time compound and add up to an incredible outcome. If you wake up every day and instead of pushing the snooze button and snoozing for nine minutes, you rather wake up and read an educational or inspirational book. You could read about 5 pages every day. Over a year this insignificant daily action, would add up to you having read 1825 pages. The average book is about 250 pages, so by waking up and reading for only 9 minutes a day, you could read about 7 educational or inspirational books a year. Do you think over a five or ten year period this would make a difference to the way your life turned out? Could you imagine, what you could achieve, if you turned those 9 minutes a day into thirty minutes or even an hour?
The secret to allow these small almost insignificant actions, like reading for only nine minutes every morning, to compound and add up to significant outcomes, is to be consistent and never allow anything to break your routine. I have a ritual every morning, which takes me about an hour to complete. This ritual consists of meditating, visualising and reading. I wake up every day at 3:30 am and after completing my meditation, visualisation and reading, I write for two hours. Getting up this early helps me to kick start my day and I get an incredible amount of writing done each morning.
The other day I had an early breakfast meeting, which was due to start at 6:30 am. To accommodate this early start I woke up at 2:30 am that day, so that I could complete my morning ritual and still get my writing done. One of my friends, who was attending the meeting was horrified that I had woken up that early, he asked me why I didn’t just give up on the meditation, visualisation and reading for one day, as this early breakfast was a unique occurrence. My response was pretty straight forward, unique occurrences happen more often than we like to admit and as soon as we start making and justifying exceptions, we break our routine and we kill our consistency. The way we do anything is the way we do everything. In my book exceptions are euphemisms for excuses.
There are going to be days where you break your consistency, you are only human and we do slip up on occasion. The secret is to move on and get back to your routine and constancy straight away, don’t dwell on the small slip, rather look at what you have gained due to your consistent effort over time. Anthony Robbins said it so well when he said “Sometimes we think we are losing at the game of life, when we’re really winning, simply because we are not keeping score” Never allow yourself to lose perspective and constantly acknowledge where you have come from and everything you have accomplished.
Take the time to acknowledge your successes and reward yourself for them. Keep a journal or an achievement board, detailing all your success. This journal or achievement board can serve as your reminder, during those difficult periods, when you lose momentum and feel like nothing is working out. Look at your achievement board or page through your journal and explore all the wonderful successes you have enjoyed.
The best way to use an achievement journal or achievement board is to include a blend of details on the people your actions have positively touched and all the successes you have enjoyed. Try to highlight how you have changed your behaviours, attitude, values, skills and knowledge. Invest time every day to look at all your achievements and give yourself permission to smile and feel the glow of success.
Patience
Success in anything takes time, personal development is no different. This fast paced, instant popcorn, microwave culture we live in, coerces us into believing that everything should be instant. This creates unrealistic expectations around how quickly things should happen in our lives. Personal development is a lifelong commitment and as such do not expect instant overnight results, from any personal development process. Personal development is a commitment you make to yourself, to consistently take action every day to ensure that you wake up every day, just a little better than you were the day before. Your commitment is not about becoming better than anyone else, but rather a commitment to become better than you were.
When you commit to a lifelong process of continual development and lower your expectations about how quickly you should see results. You put yourself in a position to gradually improve. This allows you to stay committed to any personal development program you undertake and gives the process time to work in your life. You have a lifetime to keep growing and developing, so have patience, keep working on your development every day and within a reasonable time you will begin to see consistent improvement, in not only your level of skill, ability and knowledge, but also in the results you will enjoy.
Teach what you are Learning
It is astounding how much you can learn yourself, if you commit to teach the skills or knowledge you are learning from any personal development process, to someone else. As you share the new insights with other people you are better able to conceptualise and understand the information yourself. When you are articulating information to someone else, your brain absorbs the information and it becomes more believable and applicable to you. As you learn something new and teach it to others, you are exposed to the same information, over and over again. This repetition is one of the most powerful tools to help you learn anything new. Teaching also helps us to endorse and prove the importance of the new knowledge to ourselves. When you share information with other people you also get valuable feedback and a different perspective.
Any personal development process you start and consistently use, will transform your life. Learning and growth is a lifetime commitment, so constantly look for new ways to grow and expand. As you learn, grow and become more, you will most certainly attract more into your life.
Author: Andrew Horton Motivational Speakers
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