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Do you know how hard it is to change yourself when you don’t know where to start and what exactly you should do when you aren’t given any directions in your life?
If you said yes, you’re in the right place.
It’s a shame that schools don’t teach you these lessons on life and career. Society expects you to get it right off the bat or ignores you on an offer based on a quality you don’t have when they don’t give you feedback.
I tried to figure out how to change myself and my personality in life for years without anyone guiding me. Luckily for you, I have made it easier to find the direction you want to go to in life while also adding in my personal experiences.
In this guide, I’ll go through this list to help you on your journey, which includes:
The Five Steps That Will Show You How to Analyze Your Personal Development Progress:
1. Personal Analysis
The first step to progress in personal development is to find out the strengths and weaknesses in your personality and skills.
I suggest writing it down with pen and paper (or a digital document with a stylus). Writing things down will likely tell your brain to commit to it, compared to typing it out digitally or simply storing it in your head.
You must accept the current state of your mindset because you will at least know where you currently stand and how far or how much work it will take to achieve the status you want to reach in life.
It is also helpful to reflect on how you were raised and treated as a child through adulthood by crucial figures in your life. Doing that would give you an easier to identify how your personality developed and eventually give you more confidence on how to improve.
In my case, I was very introverted throughout most of my years in college and timid around people. But I had a powerful desire to change my behavior and become a different person.
Furthermore, my introversion and shyness stemmed from my dad's authoritarian parenting style.
He was the type that would point out my problems without giving any encouragement and would harshly criticize me if I did something wrong. It severely affected my confidence and self-esteem in the actions I wanted to take.
Eventually, this topic was brought up with my dad. The entire time, he thought he was encouraging me, as expected from the thoughts of an authoritarian parent.
So, you can probably easily imagine how I interacted with people.
There were times when my behavior would be seen as rude to others without having that intention because my dad taught me that behavior as he scolded or punished me.
Luckily, I had people who would give me feedback about it and were very understanding about my situation.
Other times, people in my life did the opposite. They would bring up my problems and criticize me instead.
If you want to know more about how I dealt with this situation, please continue reading to the end. I will bring up the solutions to this and the influences it can inflict on your life if it's not resolved.
2. Personal Objectives
If you set a plan without a clear goal, it is only a dream. If you set a plan with a clear roadmap and specific deadline, it becomes a goal.
I would go back to your list of personal strengths and weaknesses and evaluate how you'll reach your goal with those qualities.
Is there something specific that needs to be changed to reach your goal?
Figure out the steps (minimum of four) you will need to take in your life and perhaps do some research on them.
The crucial takeaway while writing down your goals is to never share your goals with anyone.
The reasons why are:
You're very likely to lose motivation along the way
You're less likely to stay committed to your goals after telling them to someone
This is a form of instant gratification
By showing your results instead, you're more likely to succeed through the concept of delayed gratification
As an example, imagine yourself telling your goals to someone.
You may get a sense of satisfaction afterwards, but this puts an imaginary weight on your back, the feeling of expectancy after completing your goal. For every person you tell your goals to, that imaginary weight increases each time.
Compared to keeping quiet about your goals, that imaginary weight isn't there, so that sense of obligation to the number of people you tell does not exist. You'll mentally be able to rest easier.
Once you show people the results of your goals, the overwhelming feeling of satisfaction you get from people comes flooding in all at once. This method hits two birds with one stone.
In addition, this is where you should start building good habits and having a positive mindset that will help you succeed in your goals.
Training your mind to stay calm before letting yourself become emotional and staying rational in any situation is a crucial key component to personal success in any aspect of your life.
3. Personal Skills
When you're evaluating your skills for your development, you should improve the ones you are good at and figure out what specific skills are required as part of your roadmap that would help you along your journey.
I would not recommend you practice skills you are terrible at or learn a new skill and reach it at a mediocre level. The only exception is for a hobby you enjoy.
The reason is that if you are learning or practicing something to be mediocre at, it might do more harm than good in your life.
You might think you would save time and money by doing this. It turns out that there will always be someone better at a skill than you, despite the amount of practice you do.
The sooner you realize this, the easier your life will be since this will eventually give you better time management skills and a huge moment of realization that your skills are better off with someone who can do the job more efficiently than you.
In my case, I was trying to learn how to code a website. I thought if I spent time learning about it through free online sources, I would eventually get good at it and save lots of money.
I didn't.
It eventually got worse as time went on. I ended up paying money to people to fix specific areas of code on my website that I didn't have enough experience to fix.
In the end, I wasted more time and money learning skills I didn't need to learn when I could be doing something more productive.
But when it comes to hobbies for skills that you are not good or mediocre at, dancing would be my example, specifically hip-hop. Although I'm okay at it (I haven't danced for years), it is still something I would enjoy doing when I make the time.
Furthermore, this hobby had a positive effect on my self-confidence. It requires constantly changing body language that tells the brain I'm in a positive mood. Specifically, anti-gravity movements tell the brain that you're experiencing joy, or at least you're trying to.
(This relates to when humans were living out in the wilderness tens of thousands of years ago, and this part of us has not changed one bit.)
4. Personal Growth
Personal growth is having the desire and confidence of stepping out of your comfort zone and focusing on becoming a better version of yourself than the person you were yesterday.
The confidence and energy don't come naturally to you since it is something you will have to create and build within yourself, and that comes with practice.
This is where your portion of the roadmap you've created becomes very specific with the actions you will need to take to bring yourself close to your goal.
Start your actions small and work your way up slowly. Similar to workout exercises, you can increase your reps as your body gets stronger.
When it comes to my own personal growth, like any other rational person in college, I would join clubs to see if I could change myself. A significant part of that change would be a club called Circle K International.
The environment was very social for every meeting, and I often got a bit intimidated when interacting with people. I eventually got used to it once I have gotten to know people more until I met someone new.
About a year or two later, I eventually got comfortable talking to new people.
It turns out that it only changed me a little and not enough to get the personal changes and qualities I wanted. I lacked a specific direction of where and how I wanted to go in my life.
So when I transferred to University of California, Irvine, I tried rejoining the club again, but it didn't hit me the same when I joined for the first time.
I felt that I got what I needed for my development and my time would be better spent focusing on something else where I would find growth again.
5. Personal Connection
"It's not about what you know. It's who you know."
That is an important lesson that will be crucial throughout your life.
With that said, once you find yourself making progress throughout your personal growth, it's time to move on to connecting with people.
When you connect and surround yourself with people who have similar goals and mindsets as you or the ones you aspire to have, you will start to think like them due to environmental learning.
Human psychology is an extraordinary thing. When you surround yourself with like-minded people, you will start taking in their habits and behavior.
If you surround yourself with millionaires, you will eventually become a millionaire. If you surround yourself with poor people, you are bound to become a poor person later. If you surround yourself with stupid people, you'll make terrible decisions in your life.
By increasing the number of connections in an area you want to be a part of, you are opening yourself to more opportunities in life.
But not all opportunities are created equal. Once you've learned the ability to create opportunities in your life like me, you will have to pick and choose your battles.
In my case, I've had opportunities that all provided benefits. But there were a few where costs outweighed the benefits, and I've lost time and energy as a consequence.
And there were opportunities I planned on creating but didn't take because I realized the costs ahead of time exceeded the benefits at that time.
And I've mentioned previously in personal analysis that there were people in my life who would rather bring up my problems and criticize me instead.
Unfortunately, you have to encounter these types of people throughout your life.
These people typically have huge egos and less empathetic than regular people. That's because ego and empathy operate in the same region in the brain. They're constantly competing with each other over territory, so you can't have it both ways.
So that being said, it is difficult to change them, especially when they are not looking to change themselves. You would mostly end up wasting your time instead.
So my advice:
Stop interacting with them if it's someone you don't know and laugh at them to yourself about it. Their negative mindset will eventually bring misery to their life, so that's pretty much karma taking care of them.
If it's someone you know, temporarily cut ties with them and tell them to self-reflect with hopes that their pain as a result of his/her actions will help them change themselves.
If no change can be seen in them after some time, permanently cut ties with them. You'll thank yourself for doing that.
Final Words
Now I don't expect you to change and get immediate results after reading this because these things take a lot of time.
It's like building a business or start-up for the first time.
Nine out of ten times, you will fail, but each time you fail, you reflect on what you did wrong while improving and adding the things you did right. It's all about persistence.
It also applies to relationships, applying for jobs, etc.
And as you eventually change your philosophies and worldview, so will your personality and mindset. It will be similar to where I am more extroverted, confident, and have no problems speaking in public.
If you would like more guidance on how to change your life, I highly recommend buying these two books for yourself since this is where I have started in the beginning as well:
Millionaire Success Habits: The Gateway to Wealth & Prosperity by Dean Graziosi
I find this book to be helpful when it comes to boosting your self-esteem and confidence in life.
Other than the fact that the author is now rich because of his mindset, he is actually a dyslexic person who has been told that he is a stupid person by his teachers since he was a child due to the fact that he can't read which had a major impact on his self-esteem.
So I find it that it can be helpful to you to see how he changed his mindset during the process of his personal journey.
I want to change my current mindset into a more positive one!
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear
I find this book very helpful if you have dreams or goals in life but don't know where to start or to begin.
James Clear makes it simple to help you achieve your goals or your dreams turning into goals by creating habits that is within another habit and making the entire process easier.
I want to make my goals easier in life!
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