Personal development is no longer something that is a nice extra if you have time for it.
It has even become part of the workplace where employers realize that employees who are happy and fulfilled are likely to be more productive and passionate about their work.
There are countless products and programs on the market that can help you achieve your goals and finding the right one for you might seem a little daunting.
Life Coaching
Life Coaching is a relatively new industry that grew from the success that many great sportsmen achieved as a result of good coaching. People realized that having an objective person observe the way they negotiate their daily lives can give them incredible insight into the small or large changes they can make in order to live a more fulfilled life.
Life coaches can help with anything from organizational skills, time management, self- esteem and achieving excellence in your career.
Many companies employ coaching companies to work with their staff either on a short or longer term basis. In this context, coaching is tailored to address the needs of the individual specifically in the workplace.
Anything from teamwork to leadership skills can be tackled and honed. If you are interested in professional or personal growth, find out when your company next hosts professional growth events. If they do not offer programs like this, perhaps you can lobby your HR department to look into it?
Best Productivity Tools
The generation in the workforce today has access to better communication tools and more information than ever before, and yet our workloads seem to be increasing, rather than decreasing. It’s all too easy to suffer from information overload.
You may have heard of some of the tools, such as the popular note-taking app, Evernote, and the social media management tool, Hootsuite, but many of the lesser-known apps are worth a look too, such as:
- Remember The Milk: This is a surprisingly handy to-do list tool that can be used to manage your work and life
- Basecamp: This is a project management tool used by large and small businesses. It makes information sharing easy as well as gives teams flexibility to ask any questions and quickly find answers.
- MindMeister: This is a tool that brings the tried and tested mind-map up to date for the digital age
- WordPress: The platform can be used to organize your calendar, create a private blog and even manage your to-do list
- Zapier: This is a powerful automation tool that lets you connect and automate operations on more than 250 web apps. This is a great tool to set up Unified Communications in your company.
- Text Optimizer: This is your ultimate writing productivity tool allowing you to research the topic and grab some semantically relevant phrases and sentences to use.
Another useful productivity tool that I have been using a lot is called Visualping that can be useful for a lot of productivity tasks, like monitoring news and keeping an eye on software updates. The tool lets you subscribe to just about anything to get automated alerts when something important happens.
One of the things you can track using the tool is Covid updates issued by the CDC website:
Popular Personal Growth Books
If you are not able to make use of a personal life coach or get input from professional growth programs at your place of work, you could always go it alone with a good book. “Self – Help” sections in bookstores are notoriously difficult to navigate as there are so many titles that are deemed to be of substandard quality.
Another obstacle is the fact that very few experts know how to convey their ideas without succumbing to restrictive stereotypes that leaves the advice lacking in depth. There are some books, however, that have continuously smashed best- seller records due to their excellence in conveying useful information that can be applied by the individual.
One of these is The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey. Gallwey was the captain of the Harvard University Tennis Team. In the 1970’s he lived in an ashram where he learnt meditation techniques that he claimed dramatically improved his ability to focus and subsequently improved his tennis.
The book goes on to explore how the “inner game” can be optimally ‘played’ to enhance aspects of one’s performance. The book has been reworked into several formats such as:
- The Inner Game of Music (for musicians who have to perform consistently at a high standard),
- The Inner Game of Work and The Inner Game of Stress.
The search for personal growth comes more naturally to some than others. Seeking it helps us to find increasing satisfaction in our personal and professional lives.
Image by drromie from Pixabay