Personal development. If you could put what drives career success into one phrase, that would be the phrase.
Personal development is the conscious pursuit of self-growth by expanding self-awareness and improving personal skills.
Basically, what it takes is for you to consider your aims in life, assess your skills, and continuously strive to improve them in areas that will help you achieve your aims.
The key component of personal development is self-awareness. That is, knowing yourself well – your own passions, aspirations, and what it is that will make you fulfilled. This knowledge is the foundation upon which true success is built.
However, the most common mistake you must avoid is thinking that fulfillment comes from what you get. Don’t assess career advancement opportunities based only on what you’ll get. The reason is that what you’ll get is not nearly as important as what you’ll become.
For instance, some jobs seem difficult and with little pay but may offer more opportunity for you to learn, develop yourself, and become a better person. Another may offer more pay, look more ‘corporate’, but exposes you to less responsibility and experience. If you’re conscious of your personal development, you’ll prefer the former irrespective of the little pay.
This personal development principle is summed up best by John Ruskin when he says, “The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.”
That’s why the important question to ask on a job is not; what am I getting? Instead, you should ask; what am I becoming? Getting and becoming are so closely intertwined—what you become directly influences what you get.
Most of what you have today you have attracted by becoming the person you are right now. So when you stop developing yourself, you have inadvertently stopped possible increase in your income because income rarely exceeds personal development.
Even when your income takes a lucky jump (which happens sometimes), if you don’t develop yourself enough to handle the responsibilities that come with it, it will usually shrink back to the amount you can handle. The fact is: It is hard to keep that which has not been obtained through personal development.
Here is the great axiom by Jim Rohn which you should focus most of your attention on: To have more than you’ve got, become more than you are.
Hence, to progress, you must continue to develop yourself to become better.
If not, you just might have to contend with Jim Rohn’s axiom of not developing yourself, which is: Unless you change how you are, you’ll always have what you’ve got.
It’s no wonder many of us are not fully satisfied with where we are at professionally. Perhaps, we are ignoring that crucial personal development component that helps us become better and more attractive in our profession.
Truth is, success is not something you pursue. It’s like chasing a butterfly, you can’t just catch it.
Success is something you attract by the person you become.
And it’s through personal development that you can sustainably become who you want to become. In other words, you can use personal development to steer your life to success. But you must make it a conscious pursuit and a continuous process.
Successful professionals don’t just hope for success. They take intentional action to make it happen. They’re constantly seeking ways to improve their skills and knowledge to ensure they remain attractive and can continue to earn well into the future.
And the way to start is one small step at a time. Read value-adding books; take a course; volunteer in the field you hope to enter; or join an organization that is related to your career goal.