How much you will excel in your career depends upon personal and professional development. Both are very much interrelated yet different from each other.
Mostly both come with time and from experience. However, we can develop such skills in ourselves and children by focusing on them from an early age.
Getting involved in different scenarios to develop ourselves is important. Some people have such available opportunities and others are in situations during their childhood or teenage. Many others started learning them after getting into a job. Those who started early will become mature in their teenage and grow such personal and professional skills.
Where to Start?
Personal development starts at home and mostly depends upon the community environment, parents, and siblings. The role of parents is the most important to build a character that has values, strength, determination, and honesty. Remember the book 7 Habits of highly successful people. All are the basic habits that have to develop from the very start of life. Parents need to work on the maturity of their children by making them more responsible.
Professional development depends upon the organizational environment, the behavior of the immediate boss or manager, opportunities, exposure, decision making, etc. Give anybody to experience these things and notice the professional development.
How to Develop?
We all know time is the best teacher and everybody learns with time. But to grow faster we need to work from an early age. Let’s discuss the ways to develop personality and professionalism:
- Work On Character Development:
Character development is the first and the most important step to grow in life. It is the root on which the whole tree flourish. So it is needed to develop strong roots. It provides a person with trustworthiness, honesty, and truthfulness which are keys to success.
For parents, you just have to show the character to build the character. The eyes and mind of the children are like cameras that capture everything they see and observe. So show them character by behavior. This is the reason why during the old days’ people especially rulers used to send their children for personal development to other places. They provide their children with a designated teacher or mentor.
So once you build a character, it will keep on giving fruits for life.
- Develop Focus by Guiding Towards a Path:
This is the key step that as many people around us keep on searching their path. In this struggle, they waste half of their lives. Some of them become very successful even after that. Imagine what if they start that path 10-20 years before. They can do wonders. I often use to give an example of KFC, the known food brand. It is now in more than 150 countries with thousands of branches and millions of employees. What is he started early in his teenage? But everything has a time, you just need to have a will to achieve it.
This is the issue mostly in developing countries where parents never give room to their children to make the decision for their career. The children waste the money to graduate and then when they get financial independence, they start working on the area of their interest.
So we need to guide and put our children to one path of his/her’s choice. This will create more focus to achieve their goals.
- Set Goal and a Vision:
To achieve something one has to first imagine it. And it is a saying that what a human can imagine it has an ability to achieve it.
So set your vision for life and then set small goals that will take you to success. The goals are like targets or steps to your destination.
Once you select your path and become focussed, it becomes easy for you to visualize how far you want to go. So always dream big and set a broader vision. At the end of the day, you will surely achieve it.
- Learn to Lose and to Win
Winning and losing are part of the game but the player should learn how to react to both of them. Wining gives you confidence and hopes while losing provide you with the experience. Learning from your mistakes after losing is the key thing.
Losing takes you to the self-assessment and protect you from overconfidence. Moreover, you get the experience and learning of not doing the work that way.
So it is important to behave sensibly in both conditions and remain determined till the achievement.
- Never Say No to learning:
To grow in your personal and professional life it is important to keep on learning from cradle to grave. We should learn to learn and keep on developing skill sets.
In this ever changing world, it becomes more important as the technology changes within the time span of 10 years. Gone are the days when people spend whole life successfully on the basis of just one skill.
In the end, it should be mentioned that the personal and professional development is the foremost area to pay attention from the very start of life. The career, the business, and life become successful by working on this domain.