Personal Development: Finding Your Strengths

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How do you know is you should invest time in personal growth? The answer is easy. Everyone could benefit from improving themselves, so if you are a living person, you must grow to continue living. Stagnation = Death. Growth = Life.

Personal growth requires constant improvement through self-awareness. Knowing who you are, your areas of weakness and areas of strengths, and knowing what you want to improve are all important in personal growth. Depending on where you are in your life, you may identify that there are multiple areas that need to have defined goals.

Areas that are focuses of change are defined as 7 life areas: HEALTH, FINANCES, EMOTIONAL, SPIRITUAL, FAMILY, SOCIAL OR CAREER.

Personal growth can be needed in one area or all seven at the same time. Many times, if one area improves, other areas improve simultaneously. For example: If you experience success with personal growth in the area of career, your finances would improve, your emotions would improve, and physically you may feel better and may also improve relationships. Even if you feel you are highly successful, there is still room to grow. If you have already achieved success, you cannot stay put if you want to remain successful - The world and other people around you are constantly evolving, so maintaining constant self-development and personal goals will help to ensure that you keep developing talents and increase your potential in other areas.

1. Make A List Of All Your Strengths and Weaknesses

Be very honest about both lists, and use the examples below to guide your thinking.

Strengths

Ambitious
Compassionate
Cooperative
Devoted
Easy going
Entrepreneurial
Flexible
Genuine
Good listener
Helpful
Imaginative
Independent
Leader
Organized
Outgoing
Patient
Professional
Responsible
Sense of Humor
Sincere
Thoughtful
Trustworthy
Understanding

Weaknesses

Aggressive
Bossy
Careless
Compulsive
Conservative
Dishonest
Foolish
Foolhardy
Fussy
Greedy
Grumpy
Impatient
Impulsive
Inconsiderate
Intolerant
Jealous
Lazy
Mean
Moody
Narrow-minded
Nervous
Overcritical
Pessimistic
Quick-tempered
Sarcastic
Self-centered
Stubborn
Timid
Unreliable

2. Identify Your Strengths

Next, identify if you can use your strengths to develop or work on your weaknesses. For example,you identify a strength as a sense of humor and a weakness as pessimistic. You could have a goal to use your sense of humor to change a pessimistic outlook into a positive outlook.

3. Identify 3 Specific Goals.

Create detailed plans regarding each goal. Remember to include: what, where, and when in your plan. For example, if you identify yourself as impatient, a few good specific goals could be:

"I will take 3 deep breaths every time I feel impatient".
"I will keep a journal of when I use this technique and the outcome (success or not)."
"I will do this for 1 month and evaluate if I need to change my plan."

A re-evaluation of goals and plans is important to monitor achievement or need to change, and this is one way to achieve your fullest potential. Personal growth requires self-reflection - The ability to acknowledge areas in your life that need to be changed, which must be an honest self-evaluation. The proces of self-transformation requires time and dedication to make changes in behaviors, patterns or attributes that have been long standing, and self-development requires the constant re-evaluation and re-adjustment of goals and plans. To maximize your ability to succeed, It is important that you stick with a plan and follow-through until the time comes when you must re-evaluate and update your approach.

Remember - Even the small successes in your goals are valuable and worthy of celebration. This will help to encourage yourself to continue moving forward and transforming yourself into everything that you have envisioned.

- Kim B.