Guide To Self-Development
Self-development is a term that has to do with tapping the potential of people. The world is filled with unhappy people. Much of this unhappiness is due to a person’s inability to progress in life. This inability may be caused by external or internal forces, or both.
Potential is not something to be gained as much as it is something to be nurtured. For example, let’s say you have a car that only gets 21 miles to the gallon. By cleaning the spark plugs and the air filter you might bring the miles per gallon up to 27. Nothing was really added to the car, you just helped the car reach higher potential in energy efficiency.
It’s like that with many people, they just need a little or a lot of tweaking to reach higher potential. One could say that a college degree could provide this potential. However, a college degree oftentimes just allows a person to use their potential. A college education can augment one’s potential because of added knowledge.
They say that man only uses about ten percent of his or her brain. That’s means most peoples’ brains have tremendous potential. The trick is to discover a way to utilize the unused 90% of the brain.
We often read or hear stories of disabled people who achieve incredible skill in one area or another. For these people, self-development can be more difficult. But, it’s not impossible. This fact should be encouraging to all of us.
“Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie.” William Shakepeare
If you want to be a great public speaker, you will need to give hundreds of speeches. If you have the potential to be a great public speaker, you will most likely have to overcome the fear of public speaking. Practice will reduce the fear.
Discovering potential can be fun and exciting, once you know to look for it. The key to developing potential is to start small and progress from there. For instance, if you believe you have the potential to be a writer don’t start out by trying to write a 500-page book.
Write some letters to people first and grow from there. Ask for feedback at every opportunity and measure it for accuracy. If you find that feedback from several people is pointing to one weakness, don’t ignore it. Embrace the weak area of your writing and overcome it.
Grasp every opportunity to write and strive to make each one a work of art. Make some rules about your writing such as, not delivering a written document until some capable person proofreads it first. You will learn from correcting errors and typos.
It’s fair to say that every human being is born with a significant amount of potential. Start today to discover yours.
