The key to managing your own personal development is knowing your own strengths and areas for improvement. Knowing these can help you to develop your weaknesses and turn them into strengths. An accurate self-analysis will only give you room for improvement and it is important to be totally honest with yourself in order to improve on some of your biggest weaknesses.
Personal Development also has a number of business benefits; according to www.effective-positive-thinking.com, 42% of today’s companies do not believe in personal development coaches, yet, conversely, this same study revealed that if these companies had used a coach, they would have increased their income by 46%! Of those who had received coaching, the survey revealed:
· 62.4% of employees got smarter in goal-setting
· 52.4% of employees became more self-confident
· 57.1% of employees experienced the lowest levels of stress
· 25.7% of them left their vices and bad habits behind
· 33% of employees say they’re unlikely to fulfil their career aspirations in their current organisation
Not only does personal development benefit the business in many ways, it can also benefit each individual employee in different ways:
1. Mental health/self-esteem – Self-management doesn’t only improve your work life, it also can help you to develop your personal life in a variety of different ways (for example, improving relationships, achieving a work-life balance, controlling your actions and emotions better; the options are endless! Whichever way you want to develop yourself, a confidence boost will be an added bonus). Keeping track of your positive and negative behaviours can help you to manage them better; preventing negative behaviours and encouraging positives ones. This can help you to become the person you want to be and therefore, improve your self-confidence and performance at work, whilst developing your self-esteem and mental health.
2. Productivity/motivation – Self-awareness can increase your productivity. Becoming aware of your strengths and weaknesses can encourage you to produce higher quality work – seeing improvement in yourself can give you a little confidence boost and motivate you to achieve more!
Self-awareness can also guide you to develop your weaknesses into strengths For example, a poor attitude can be turned into a positive one – this can be achieved by recognising the impact and consequences of your attitude and how it can affect others around you. It’s certainly not easy, but becoming more aware of how others respond to or absorb your mood/behaviour may encourage you to control it – or even turn it into a positive attitude in order to encourage others in the workplace! This should give you the drive that you need to become more productive and work harder to achieve your personal goals.
3. Improves Skills – improving your areas of development will also improve your skills, for example; if you are trying to improve your telephone manner, you can use your personal development tools to keep track of this in order to develop the skill. This could make you a more competent worker and your colleagues may even recognise that you are becoming more dynamic. Who knows? This could open up opportunities for career growth and promotions.
So how can you use personal development in your business and what tools are out there to guide you? A tool that we like to use at Discovery is a Personal Effectiveness Wheel. This is a handy little tool used to help you analyse and keep track of your areas of improvement – they may even turn your weaknesses into strengths! The wheel is split into 8 segments, each of these segments should represent a different area of development (these can be any skill you’d like to improve on, such as time-keeping, telephone manner or attitude etc.). Once you have written a development area for each segment, you can then start to rate yourself out of 10 on these skills (The band closest to the centre being a 1, and the outer band being a 10) – be as honest as you can! Completing these on a weekly or monthly basis can help you to keep track of your skills and make it easier to see how far you have come. Recognising your areas of development can only encourage you to keep achieving!
If you find it hard to recognise your strengths or weaknesses, another way is to try to understand how others see you. Ask those around you what adjectives they associate with you, how they experience interactions with you, and where they think your strengths and weaknesses lie. Start to apply their feedback, and see how it affects your personal development… This is a great start to evaluating yourself!
If you’d like to give personal development a try, why not use our Personal Effectiveness Wheel and let us know how it helps you to grow to achieve your personal goals over the New Year – we’d love to hear your feedback!
