Personal development

Ask ourselves this question – “Am I satisfied with my current personal development?” What is personal development and how do we want to measure it? Do we focus too much on one sphere of life or should the required the so called development as a total? The meanings we attach to what we perceive as development depends on our needs. It is therefore rather very subjective in nature. No two people interpreting the same meaning perceive it exactly the same.

To be clear about that, we must be personally objective on what kind of development we want to achieve. Some of us already developed, advanced and very successful in one sphere of our life, but at the expense of another. How about break it down into smaller components such as financial, education, family, personal, economy, social, work, community, and spiritual? Here are few simple tips we may want to embrace as a checklist either we stagnant or progress:-

1. Financial – What should be acceptable yardstick to check either we are financially sound and healthy? What are our goals and how much money is enough to support our living?
2. Education – What level of education is sufficient to facilitate our progress? It is a ticket or a must?
3. Personal – What are our strengths and how should we polish on them and make them advance and significant?
4. Economy – What are those steps if any to keep improving our economics standard at micro level as a very basic cluster or household?
5. Social – What should we do to be socially developed? What body or organization should we involve in and take part?
6. Work or career – What would you do to be advance in career path be you working on your own or employed? How about latest trend of working from home or well known as small office home office (SOHO) if we want to balance between career and family needs? Working mothers should analyze this idea thoroughly.
7. Community – What can we contribute to our community around us so that the community that we live in accepted us as part of the group?
8. Spiritual – “I can be developed in other areas of my life. It is fine for me if I’m not spiritual?” How would you want God to guide you irrespective of what religion you may be embraced?

Public speaking

All of us at one time or another ever remembered our public speaking experience when presenting - ideas, projects, proposals, plans, or anything either in a smaller or bigger group. In fact, we are much likes salesperson because we have to sell out our thoughts and ideas to others so that they would deal with us.

We must possess skilled public speaking if we want to go further in life. No matter how good our ideas or points we would like to express out, it would be a very challenging task to get the message connected to our audiences if we doesn't improve our public speaking skill. To improve our standing in the business community, we need to convince our business associates, suppliers, and potential customers. In corporate world, good public speaking skill would helps if we want to go further in our career. The skill is not so difficult after all. I also experienced it tough at the first place for scare of being caught to make mistakes in terms of grammar, sentences, and chosen of words used. Somehow, over time I managed to reduce this fear gradually.

For those in business, good public speaking would even polish their skill further and help to push them into the next trajectory in their success as they can do many things as follows:

• Re-enforce their self-confidence level
• Will increase their circle of friends and business contacts
• Good connection will give an opportunity to earn extra income from various sources
• Always dare to be at the edge of things and issues because the skill train us to be clear and strategic in our thinking, persuasive, assertive, and strong power of influence.
  
• Reduce inferiority complex syndrome.
• Enjoy the rewarding skill which doesn't need so much money to learn.

The power of ' I '

Have you ever asked yourself this question: What does improvement start with?

To a college student, he may ask: how could his studies be improved, obtained good mark, passed the exam and graduated? Possible answers could be:

• Teachers or lecturers need to improve their teaching methods and materials for effective presentation and learning. No doubt, teachers or lecturers are not perfect and need to keep update their presentation so their classes will always interesting.
• Need conducive and contributive environment where one can focus.

Another scenario could be in the office; be it in private sector or government. A sub-standard staff may ask the same question: how his productivity and performance can be improved? Possible answers could be:

• “My boss must be supportive.”
• The products or services must be competitive.

Again, no doubt that the boss is human being which still needs to improve his managerial and leadership skills. By improving the said skills, he will be able to make connection to the staff concern and will solve the issue at hand.

Actually, one doesn’t need to look very far to find the answer, because it is lies within oneself. Look at the word “improvement” itself. It is consists of 11 alphabets; namely: I.M.P.R.O.V.E.M.E.N.T. It starts with alphabet 'I'. Through enough and this is not coincident, but we only realize about it if we are passionate enough about what improvement is all about.

Yes, the improvement must start with 'I' or in another term refers to: Me, You, and each one of us. Thus, we need to put a stop for blaming others to everything that does not happen of how we want it to be. Normally we are looking for solutions far beyond us, but in reality some of the answers to the problems actually can be found from within us.

Have I improved myself first before expecting others to improve? Think about it…