The Blog
Personal & Career Development
Categories
Topics in Personal & Career Development
Actively working on self-improvement through personal development is a key factor in achieving a fulfilling and successful career. Further, personal development often leads to better relationships in all aspects of life. Uncovering your DiSC® style can help you understand why you act and think the way you do. With this knowledge, you’ll work more effectively toward your goals, grow in your career, and relate to others in more meaningful ways.
Common questions about Personal & Career Development:
Personal development is a conscious process of improving yourself by acquiring new skills, increasing self-awareness, and pursuing continuous growth. By better understanding your own behaviors and style of communication, you can improve your personal skills, potential, employability, and even wealth.
Exploration of your own personality traits, motivations, and values helps you know when and how to leverage your self-knowledge for your own growth.
Many people who choose to take DiSC personality assessments are interested in personal development. They are seeking answers to these questions: Who am I? Who do I have the potential to become? Who do I want to become?
There’s a growing recognition of the importance of emotional intelligence (EQ) and soft skills in the workplace. Personal development includes increasing our EQ and placing our own subjective experiences in the context of others. As we attend to ourselves, we will also benefit from nurturing our relationships with friends, colleagues, neighbors, and our communities. Through personal development, we can learn how to ask for what we need and better understand what we have to offer others.
Pursuing personal development creates a shift in perspective from “life is something that happens to me” to “I am making choices while living my life.”
At its center, personal development is the way we become the best versions of ourselves. We become more confident and have greater self-esteem as we aim toward goals that are meaningful to us and build better relationships with others.
Personal development can cover any aspects of your life, but career self-development focuses on making yourself more employable or more satisfied in your career. It can cover:
- Understanding your motivations: Businesses without a vision or a mission tend to fail in meeting their potential. The same is true for the individual. What drives you? What is your vision for the future? Everyone has different answers; knowing yours is the first step in growing or changing your career.
- Auditing your strengths and weaknesses: You might have done a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis for a business, product, or service. You can also do it for yourself.
- Upgrading skills: How can you give yourself an upgrade? Consider both what skills you would enjoy learning and what would provide more career options.
- Increasing focus: Do you want to become more of a specialist, or widen your skillset?
- Navigating change: Moving outside your comfort zone is the best way to gain new skills and more confidence. Having a personal development plan can decrease your anxieties about the changes that are inevitable in this world.
There’s often a trigger that motivates someone to engage in personal development. Something happens that makes us aware that we need to make a change. It could be a birth or death, a role change, a performance review, a reunion, travel, or just about anything. It can feel like a negative event, but it can also be an awareness that you could experience something great if only you can rise to the occasion.
For some, being asked to take an assessment like Everything DiSC Workplace® or going through a 360-degree review will surface issues we want to address. We might not have taken the time to consider our strengths, our uniqueness, or our challenges until we’ve received feedback of this type.
It’s hard to avoid personal development. We do not generally live stagnant lives. We have experiences; we fail; we learn. But development really begins when we take charge of it ourselves. We make forward progress when we change our behaviors or change our thinking. We evaluate where we are now and consider where we want to go, then take steps in that direction.
Self-directed: Hannah has cousins in Argentina. She has always wanted to visit them, but was so embarrassed about not knowing Spanish that she never went. Now, Hannah chooses to take a Spanish class and practice with her grandmother. She books her trip.
With the aid of another: Chris is struggling with imposter syndrome. They’re not sure where to start, but they have an acquaintance who is working with a leadership coach. They interview a few coaches and select one to work with.
With the aid of technology: Jacob has been experiencing insomnia, making him irritable at work. He decides to tackle this by increasing his exercise and working on his sleep hygiene. He uses a monitoring device to motivate him, to help him gather data about his progress, and to identify what might trigger sleep interruptions.
Each person in these examples discovered something they wanted to change. It might have been something they were well aware of, something newly important to them, or something pointed out by others. They made personal choices on how to respond positively and develop new skills, new habits, or new mindsets.
By choosing to focus on personal development, you can impact your job and career trajectory. Understanding your DiSC personality style can:
- help boost your confidence
- identify ways to enhance your skills while fostering better communication in the workplace
- improve your ability to adapt to new situations
- help identify and address areas for improvement
All of these things can make you a more valuable employee and open doors to new opportunities.
Ready? Purchase a DiSC assessment and jump-start your personal development, today »