Four Keys to Self Development

You should always be striving for self development. I believe true happiness comes through the process of understanding yourself and what's important to you.

How can you achieve personal development, abundance and inner peace if you're not continually looking within and asking questions?

I find many people reach a time in their lives (usually after high school or college) where they believe it's time to stop learning and time to just "live life". They stop the self development process just because the structured learning setting has been replaced by a job or career.

But think of all the great knowledge and understanding you can gain from life if you keep your eyes open to learning and self improvement.

Developing yourself further is a path you decide to undertake or not to undertake. And if your goal is a life of abundance, it's a definite requirement.

If you were born with all the answers and everything all figured out, life may be a lot simpler but a whole lot less exciting and interesting, right?

Now, self development is the process of bettering yourself in a wide variety of areas, such as:

- Self Help (the way you think, your emotions, etc)
- Career or Business
- Personal Finance
- Your Relationships
- General Knowledge (world happenings, key areas of interest, etc)
- Health

These are just a few areas you may be wishing for self development in. The first step is to decide where you need or want improvement. That's the easy part.

The harder part is taking action on a consistent basis. You need to hold yourself accountable to your personal development goals. Sometimes, it helps to ask someone close to you to help with this. Let a loved one know your intentions. Let it be known that you're on a self improvement quest.

It may seem scary to do this. You realize that making this decision "public" means you're going to have to follow through with your self development plans. But if you have difficulty holding yourself to your decisons and staying disciplined in your goals, then take this step.

Ask this person to help you stay on track. Let them know you desire a better life, full of abundance. Let them know you need their help in this. Sometimes, just the gentle reminder or question about how you're doing is enough to keep you going when your own enthusiasm wanes a bit.

Once you've decided to improve yourself in a certain area, you'll need to make some adjustments in your schedule. Self development is a habit, just like anything you do.

Consistency comes from developing the habit of daily progress. You don't need to learn it all in one day. Have patience with yourself and decide to start with just a half hour or an hour a day on developing yourself. You'll be surprised how much abundance you can attract in a month or a year.

If you try to get it all done right now, you'll feel overwhelmed and you probably won't even start the process. But if you replace just that one TV show with reading a self help book or watching that personal finance DVD set you bought last year, you're making real progress.

I probably could have fit this under the Time section, but I feel this is too big to gloss over.

I've found from personal experience and input from others that once we start the self development process, we expect immediate results. Have patience!

How soon you make something an innate part of you depends on what you're working on. If you're trying to become a better cook, you'll probably see results more quickly than if you're trying to improve your over-all patience with others.

Especially with the deeper issues of your life like your spiritual growth or your emotions, it's going to take time. You have an ingrained way of reacting or thinking and you're in the process of changing. Remember, it's a process.

You may read in a self development book about the importance of not placing blame when you and your spouse have an argument. It sounds great as you read and you're going to change your normal reaction to such situations.

But the next time it happens, you find yourself blurting out the blame statement just like in the past. Don't get down on yourself. It's in your consciousness and over time, you will change. As you do, you'll experience a more abundant relationship.

I actually learned this concept at an early age learning to play guitar. I would practice something sometimes for weeks and it still felt awkward and clumsy under my fingers. But then, if I kept at it, I'd "all of a sudden" be able to play it perfectly - clean and fluidly.

It wasn't all of a sudden, of course, but one day it felt wrong and the next day it all came together. I learned that everything in life is like this. See how if you just get after the act of self development in one thing, you can sometimes get very unexpected lessons from it for another?

This one comes up often on my site because it's so vital to achieving life abundance. You can achieve major self improvement in any area you want to with the right attitude and mindset. It really is all about how you think.

Nothing could be more accurate when it comes to self development!

Change your life,

Matt