How to stop postponing your personal growth
How to stop postponing your personal growth and prioritise learning without stressing out about missing your business deadlines.
“If you are not willing to learn, no one can help you. If you are determined to learn, no one can stop you.” - Zig Ziglar
I get it, you know it’s important to make personal growth and development a priority in order to maximise your mindset and boost your skills and capability for your work and life, but something just keeps getting in the way, right? You say to yourself… “I’m definitely going to spend some time reading that business book / watching that training series/working on my mindset / researching the right coach for me this week” … but then you take a look at your to-do list and your calendar and all that learning drops to the bottom of the pile. After all, you have a business to run, you have customers to serve, social media to schedule and life to, you know, live.
But here’s the thing, when you DON’T make learning and growing a priority you’re not making your potential future a priority. Remember, if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten. Is that going to help you hit your ideal life and business goals? I’m guessing not.
So here are my top tips for making personal growth and learning a priority:
#1 Remember WHY you’ll benefit from spending time on your personal development
It forces you out of your comfort zone, develops your strengths, boosts your confidence and improves your self-awareness. All these results translate directly into positives for your life AND your business.
#2 Ask yourself, what problem am I trying to solve?
When our learning and growth has a purpose it’s easier to make it a priority. Think about your key challenges in your life and business and turn them into questions that you can use your personal development and learning time to try and solve.
#3 Be selective about how you learn to avoid overwhelm
It’s tempting to subscribe to every personal improvement blog, business newsletter, podcast and YouTube channel on the planet just to soak up all that learning. But when your inbox is flooded you’re more likely to hit delete and lose out on all those opportunities to grow. Instead, be selective and choose what to read and who to follow based on who is addressing the questions and challenges you’re facing and who most resonates with you.
#4 Share what you learn to make it stick
When you teach, you learn twice. People retain 90% of what they learn when they teach someone else or use that learning immediately. So share what you learn on your personal development journey with your colleagues, in your Facebook Groups, with your coach, a friend or even a family member to cement that knowledge.
#5 Put what you learn into action
Listening to a podcast or reading a book or blog post is just listening or reading. It's not really learning. In fact most of what we listen to or read leaks out of our minds like water out of a sieve. Real learning comes from making mistakes and mistakes come from using what we learn by implementing it. So take what you’re learning, put it into practice and then review how it has helped you. Afraid to fail? Shift your mindset away from the success/failure paradigm and into continual learning by telling yourself that you’re just experimenting to see what happens.
#6 Make your personal development a non-negotiable
When you have an important event or deadline in your life or business you put it on your calendar and it gets done. Approach your personal development and learning the same way. Set a time each week when you’ll focus wholly and entirely on learning something new - just one thing - and calendarize it. Or, alternatively, make one day a month a ‘development day’ - get away from your desk (so you’re not tempted to check your email and get distracted) and enjoy spending time focusing on YOU.