What I mean here is – if you love yourself, you need to improve your effectiveness in every aspect of your professional life. You need to think critically and to embrace change.
Why focus on professional life?
The world gets more challenging every day. And the only way to survive with dignity is to get a hold of your intellect. Thinking more efficiently offers greater control over your life that helps you to deal with the challenges, sorrows, and transform your wishes into reality. Yes, it is possible.
Critical thinking is not rocket science. It comprises of pragmatic skills you can learn, practice and upgrade.
Decide better. To live is to act and to act is to decide. Routine work and life involve an infinite series of choices. Some of the choices are inconsequential, while some are life-changing.
When you think rationally, you live a rational and practical life. Rational decisions improve the quality of your life, increase your happiness, and enhance self-satisfaction.
Critical thinking improves your ability to decide better through improving your approaches of decision making up to a degree of deliberate choice and consciousness.
When deeply realized, critical thinking supports you to take charge of your thinking in every aspect of your life. it helps you to resolve issues more efficiently, make better decisions and to identify manipulative and pathological thinking.
Change
Growth lies in change. This is a simple statement that many of us agree on, however, we resist change since it is hard and we are afraid to embrace.
I am entering my 8th year in the blogging and writing field and I have faced many changes not only in the digital marketing industry but also in my professional life as a whole.
Few changes were controlled and planned (starting blogging for business and opting for new social platforms to increase visibility), however many changes were not decided (learning new coding language) and I was compelled to react and accept the change.
Because I realized, my professional growth lies in accepting change, and that will eventually going to foster my personal well-being and self-love.
The one aspect that moved me through the change process was my love of learning and growing.
With every change that I have faced so far, there was something to learn, something that I had to learn to cope up with the emerging challenges.
Related: How to Get Over the ‘Stuck’ Phase Efficiently
Continuous learning was my secret to overcoming every hurdle, every change. With every change, I embraced growth—new skills, new ideas, new work, new viewpoints and a new approach towards my self-enrichment, confidence and accomplishment.
Eventually, every change was a cornerstone to a new challenge which was conquered through continuous learning.
I am going to share five most important things you can start today to plan for your professional growth that will lead you to personal growth, self-fulfilment and self-love.
i. Practice. Practice reading every day. Sound simple isn’t it? However, with so many distractions in our lives, reading becomes a chore difficult to do each day. Try to find something exciting or fascinating to read, something that is related to your professional objectives; selects a source with relevant information. For example, I use Copyblogger since they have information that I am interested to learn.
ii. Share. Sharing is caring. After reading something I like, I make notes of it. This helps me memorizing it. You can also share what you learn through writing reviews or a blog.
Teach someone what you have learned, or if you love to speak and present, avail work conferences and presentations.
iii. Practice. Ever heard practice makes a man perfect? Well, that is true actually.
Practising what you have learned will only make you perfect in your skills, your abilities, your work and your life. For example, you love cooking and photography. Fun to practice right? Evaluate your results, acquire feedback and adjust your performance accordingly. Keep doing it and make yourself better.
iv. Associate. Being able to synergize your skills is a great way to nurture your professional development, especially when learning something new. I joined several blogging and writing forums and groups to learn together. It is a great way to stay informed, get feedback. There are several professional forums and groups that would be glad for you to join them as a contributing member.
For example, if you are an entrepreneur, The Startup Grind can offer you events focused on innovation and new start-ups. Associations are an immensely powerful way to grow your network with like-minded intellects.
v. Training. Whether online or in-person, training is an integral aspect of growth. There are several free courses in almost any profession. Opting for training courses will facilitate you to interact with the experts of your field who can share their experience with you to learn and grow. Also, these courses mostly come with a certification or a credential that is important in your professional acceleration.
Last bit…
Change is an integral aspect of our lives and you will only grow, professionally and personally, then go through whatever change you may face in your life.
To enlarge growth prospects, it is important to develop a vision and the discipline to learn to love learning!