Growth factors
Ok, we’re rapidly approaching the end of year. And even though I’m not big on resolutions, I do give some thought to how next to improve myself. I don’t know yet what will be my personal project for 2006 but for those of you thinking about personal growth and development in the future, I wanted to share with you some tips.
I found this list of preconditions to personal development which I thought gave a pretty good picture of where you need to be at in order to really achieve growth in yourself. Of course, if you’re not there yet, then maybe one of these could be your area of improvement for the upcoming year.
According to the GoalsGuy, these are 10 Preconditions to Personal Development (paraphrased by yours truly of course):
- Intellectual Curiosity - You have to know that learning is a process, and be ready to understand the forces that work around you.
- Humility - Nobody knows everything, including you so be willing to learn from others.
- Self-Criticism - Almost totally obvious, before you can change you have to be willing to question yourself.
- High Tolerance for Ambiguity, Complexity and Change - Changing yourself is naturally an experimental process (see below) so be prepared for uncertainty.
- Experimentation - Sometimes you’re just going to have to try something new and see whether it works or not.
- Hunger for Feedback - To know if stuff works you have to open yourself to feedback from others (not just yourself) and be willing to listen to it and make more changes.
- Learning by Doing - Speculating about how something will work won’t be much use.
- Appreciation for Failure and Mistakes - You learn far more from mistakes than if you get it right the first time, so accept the inevitable mistakes as learning experiences.
- Systematic Methods of Data Collection and Distribution - This one can be useful for future efforts by you, if you keep track of what you’re doing, write in a journal for example, you will be able to look back at what you learnt about the process and yourself.
- Creative Self-Destruction - You have to keep changing, and sometimes that will mean changing things previously fixed to adapt to evolving circumstances.
Right now I am feeling kindaexcited and
topsy-turvy...
