Personal Development - Worth Every Moment!

If you have just discovered the concept of personal development, you're in for a wild ride.

While the phrase personal development can mean many things and encompass many areas of life, I'll define it as:

The conscious and intentional exploration and development of our individual skills, thoughts, beliefs, tendencies and personality traits in order to improve and enhance our lives, and create and sustain our personally defined versions of happiness, success and abundance.

How's that? I'm sure I could expand on that, but essentially, my version of personal development includes ANYTHING that is part of my conscious sphere and which I notice and want to improve or change.

One beautiful thing about personal development is that when you work on an individual aspect of your life - finances, say, or physical fitness - it affects all the other areas. Changes in perception or habits snowball, and have positive effects on our lives as a whole.

Some examples of this synchronistic effect include:

• Discipline: You have decided that due to a newly made commitment to physical fitness, you will arise each day at 6am and go to the gym. Not only do you have to develop your capacity for wielding your willpower and discipline, this new habit will have far-reaching effects on your lifestyle: you will find yourself more disciplined in other areas, such as spontaneously wanting to file your paperwork or clean out your junk drawers; you will enjoy renewed vigor and confidence, both from the workouts and from your pride in what you're doing; in turn, you will have more energy and time in each day and get more accomplished.


• Awareness: Let us say you are exploring the part you play in your closest relationships. You have decided to take responsibility and change any disharmony by improving your relational skills and by being more appreciative of what you have. After you have swallowed the bitter pill of having been the creator of what you may have been blaming others for, you suddenly realize you are now free to create differently. Not only will this affect your personal level of happiness, but it will affect all of your relationships. You'll be happier, more proactive and more responsive to the needs and moods of those you love. You will find yourself more aware of what is going on around you, which in turn will lead you to notice opportunities you may have missed before, both personally and professionally. You will be open to more things, and in turn you will find new information coming to you which will benefit you.


• Expansion: Imagine you have set a financial goal that is fairly lofty, and you need to develop new skills to achieve it. In the process of pursuing this goal, you will not only be improving your financial situation, but yourself in general. As business mentor Jim Rohn has said his own mentor taught him, "Set a goal to become a millionaire not for the money, but for the person you will have to become to achieve it." Along the way, you will discover many things about yourself - mental blocks and limiting beliefs, holes in your plan and your skillset, unproductive habits and discouraging relationships - and in pursuing your financial goal, you will need to work on these things. In turn, you will yourself feeling more empowered, positive and confident, characteristics which have no choice but to manifest elsewhere in your life.

With just these small examples, you can see that personal development involves a complex, powerful and very exciting journey which is entirely unique to each individual. There is so much you could do that it can seem overwhelming, but know that no exploration can be bad. It;'s all good, and it's all part of being an awakening human being.

Whether you start with an audacious goal or some tiny steps doesn't matter - just start. Personal development can be fun, challenging, frightening, confronting, maddening, exciting, and without a doubt extremely rewarding - it's worth every moment!

Personal Development - Worth Every Moment!