We should all have goals, dreams, and ambitions that drive us toward personal development, the great thing about living in a digital age like we do today, is that personal development is also reflected in digital transformation.
Here are ways that you can develop your own personal development goals that are linked with digital transformation:
Learn and practice a new skill
If you’re serious about improving your career and life, one thing that always kickstarts the motivation for personal development is devoting yourself to learning a new skill. For example:
- Learn how to code by taking online classes from organizations like Codecademy.
- Learn how to use sales tools like Salesforce CRM (customer relationship management) software for managing customer interactions and leads.
- Learn how to use Microsoft Office and all the applications it entails like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
- Learn how to create your own paystubs to get a better grip on your finances.
Set goals that test your limits
Set goals that will force you to push yourself past what you thought were your limits. These goals should be realistic, challenging, and measurable.
- Set time-bound goals, so that you can achieve them within a specific timeframe.
- Make sure the goal is written down in a place where you will see it regularly (e.g., in a daily journal or computer screen or as the wallpaper of your smartphone).
Work on a side hustle business
Side hustles are important to have as a part of your personal development. They help you keep up with today’s rapidly changing digital world and improve your skills.
The first step in starting a side hustle is finding something that interests you and then seeing if anyone else will pay for it. If there’s enough demand, then the next step is developing the skill set needed, starting by reading books or watching tutorials online until you feel confident enough in your abilities that others are willing to pay for them.
Some great examples are:
- Writing/editing/proofreading services
- Web design (including eCommerce)
- Search engine optimization (SEO) consulting
- Being a virtual assistant for someone that needs help creating pay stubs for their employees.
Interact with strangers
The first step to interacting with strangers is to decide what you’re going to talk about. You could ask them where they got their shoes, but that’s pretty generic. If you have something in common, such as a shared job or hobby, use it!
Build those high income skills!
The goal here is simply to build up your social skills which also helps to build up self-confidence for personal development.
Get out of your comfort zone
Get out of your comfort zone by doing something new.
And hopefully, you fail epically at it, failure is one of the greatest teachers in life!
Try to connect with other people by learning more about their culture and values. Learn to be more social and talk to strangers, even if it’s difficult for you.
(If you are an introvert, we understand that there are natural limits to your sociality, and building social skills doesn’t mean that you have to become something that goes against who you are as a person).
Develop a personal brand
While it is important to know your value, it’s equally important to know how to present that value. A personal brand is how you present yourself to others.
Your personal brand can be an asset or a liability depending on how well it fits with who you are and where you want to go in life.
Start journaling your progress
Journaling is a great way to focus on the positive things in your life, as well as work through negative emotions. It’s also an excellent way to reflect on your progress and set goals for yourself. The more you journal, the more you will be able to see how far your personal development has come.
As with anything new, it can be hard to get started with journaling but once you do, it will become second nature.
A good starting point is to try writing down three things that went well each day and why or write a list of goals for the week ahead. You could almost think of journaling as your very own personal pay stubs of experiences, it will show you the results of all the effort you’ve been putting into your personal development.
Personal development includes setting goals, but you also need to work towards them.
Personal development is about setting goals, but it’s also about achieving them. This means you need to define the problem before you can figure out the solution.
If your goal is too vague or unrealistic you won’t succeed. Make sure it’s something that will motivate and inspire you every day as well as being realistic and achievable within a reasonable time frame (3-6 months).
For example: if your goal is “get stronger,” what does that mean? What kind of strength do you want? Being able to bench press 100 pounds more than last month isn’t going to help anyone, but if the goal were something like “flatten my stomach,” then we might be on our way!
Similarly, setting ambitious yet realistic personal development goals can be difficult (especially when everyone around us seems so much more accomplished). But if we set our sights too low, we won’t ever achieve anything worth celebrating.
Celebrating personal development allows us to make connections between past achievements and future ones so that learning becomes easier over time.
