First of all, personal growth is a process that makes you company all your lives. You start as little babies no more than 60 cm tall and weighing no more than 5 kg. And from the very first moments you begin this wonderful journey called growing. As a result, it is safe to say that growth is one of the few skills with which you are born.

Your life

The busy life in the XXI century, however, requires you to utilize this skill not only to grow bigger, or heavier, or taller – you need to grow your skills, spirit and knowledge. Therefore you cannot afford to spend your lives using the same skill-set, with which you start your careers (like it used to be 100 or even 50 years ago). The life has been getting busier, faster and more challenging with every single year.

The Essence of Personal Growth

Personal growth in my view is all about understanding what you have and what you need to get to your goals. Without this area, life would be like solving a puzzle without pieces. In order to optimize a computer program, or to add new features to an existing program, you need to know what you have and what you are dealing with.

The Benefits of Personal Growth

Exploring this area would help you:

• Find what you have, accept it, be happy about it and start searching for ways to use it
• Gather information, tips and examples about living a healthy life
• Start every day with a smile, confidence and all the energy you will possible need
• Learn how to use your skills in order to put all your energy in your daily activities
• Understand yourself and the people around you better and be able to anticipate your responses to certain situations
• Define your borders and understand why and how you may be missing the opportunities that life gives you every day

Topics

Personal growth includes the following activities:

Expanding self-knowledge

In my next chapters and posts I will probably talk more on the topic, but my strongest personal skills are love of learning and curiosity. This is why I always put learning and expanding my knowledge at the center of my personal projects. Self-knowledge for me is the conscious pursuit of learning more and more about yourself. You are all born with a predefined set of skills and development possibilities. If I could borrow from my IT background, I would say that you are born with a pre-installed firmware. This firmware to a great extent defines you and your lives. Self-knowledge includes the following topics:

• Know your strengths
• Know your weaknesses
• Find your role in life

Gaining emotional intelligence

There is no way you have not heard about this. In a nutshell it is about recognizing your emotions and the emotions of the people around you. And one more aspect which is the most important – the ability to anticipate the impact of your actions on yourself and everybody else.

• Understand emotional intelligence
• Understand the benefits of EI
• Use EI in business
• Use EI in the personal life

Improving your “self”

Arguably this would be the most important activity for everybody. I will not try to sell you the idea why you should improve your health. I believe in physical and mental health and that they both should co-exist in harmony. There is a correlation between both of them and I do not think that you can have one without the other. The most important topics about health that I am going to cover are:

• Have a better health in general
• Have a better body
• Strengthen your spirit
• Meditate and the importance of meditation
• Practice mindfulness and the importance of mindfulness
• Use positive mantras for improving your health

Improving motivation

Improving health, gaining knowledge about yourself and emotional intelligence would get you to a position where you know what you have and you are happy about it. But how can you move forward? Through motivation! This is one of the driving forces in the universe and in our lives. This force makes you want more from life and helps you become a better version of yourself.

• Understand motivation
• Understand the benefits of motivation
• Find your motivators
• Find your triggers
• Master motivation tricks

Stopping your limiting beliefs

After you know yourself and your development areas and after you have achieved motivation there is one last thing stopping you from becoming the best version of yourself. This is called “limiting beliefs”. These are the borders that you alone set for yourselves – through the beliefs of your parents, through the beliefs you learned in school, through unpleasant episodes in your lives. You need to learn how to recognize them and you need to keep only the ones that won’t interfere with your goals.

• Don’t be angry
• Stop looking for excuses
• Don’t procrastinate
• Stop being afraid to be judged
• Stop distrusting people based on your past
• Don’t be afraid of failure

Summary

Professional growth would help you become the person you are meant to be, not the person that everybody else wants you to be. It would help you define yourself and make a projection of yourself in the future. Everything that you possess as personality and skills and every step that you take about improving yourself makes sense in the grand scheme of life.
If I may paraphrase the famous saying about sustainability: “You do not inherit yourself from your past YOU, you borrow it from your future YOU!” Do not waste the potential of the future, by looking in the past.