4.Learning to Be – Education contributing to a person’s complete development: mind and body, intelligence, sensitivity, aesthetic appreciation and spirituality.
Learning is unavoidable and happens all the time, however, lifetime learning is about creating and maintaining a positive attitude to learning both for personal and professional development. Personal development can improve your professional opportunities, and professional development can enable personal growth.
Lifetime learning can enhance your understanding of the world around you, provide you with more and better opportunities and improve your quality of life.
Lifelong learning can impart creativity, initiative and responsiveness in you thereby enabling you to show adaptability in post-industrial society through enhancing skills to:
•Manage uncertainty.
•Communicate across – within cultures, sub-cultures, families and communities.
•Negotiate conflicts.
•Boost your confidence and self-esteem.
•Make you less risk averse and more adaptable to change when it happens.
•Help you achieve a more satisfying personal life.
•Challenge your ideas and beliefs.
There should not be any reason for learning as learning, for learning in itself is a rewarding experience. It enables a more fulfilling life at any age.
Our capacity to earn is directly related to our willingness to learn. Being well educated is not necessarily the key to employment. Employers are looking for well-balanced people with transferable skills. You should be able to demonstrate that you are keen to learn and develop.
Putting the time in for extra learning brings its own rewards. We can get more personal satisfaction from our lives and jobs as we understand more about who we are and what we do. A more highly skilled and knowledgeable employee is an asset to any company and can lead to faster promotion with associated salary increases.
Whatever your life path or age, it's never too late to start and there are a number of benefits to continual personal and professional development.
Successfully changing career path in mid-life and spending time informally developing expertise is more common than ever, especially during rapidly changing market conditions. Most people still rely on succeeding in employment for their ability to earn a living. The more flexible we can be about our direction, the easier we make our lives. Our economy is shifting gradually towards short-term and part-time contracts with more flexible work-patterns.
Depending on job durability for earnings and promotion is not as feasible as it used to be. Because of work-life instability, more people of all ages are turning their hobby into a business idea. Continually following one’s passion outside of work hours can lead you to get paid for doing what you love, and typically you will develop business and other transferable skills as you go along until the point that you can delegate your least favourite jobs.
Continuous learning is a requirement for success, and the faster you learn the faster you can apply your new knowledge to improve your life as explained below under Improve Your Learning Skills where you can learn how to read fast and remember things.
Learn from Your Mistakes
Most of us grew up thinking that mistakes are bad and should be avoided at all cost. We tend to correlate mistakes with low intelligence. The more mistakes you make, the dumber you are. However, mistakes are opportunities to learn something new. Turn a mistake into an opportunity to gain wisdom.
Knowledge builds confidence. So apply what you learn to build your new life and do what successful people do. Set new and exciting goals for yourself and get out of poverty, debt and cutting costs.
What you do with your time now will shape what you do with your time when your working days are over.
In today’s fast-changing world, it’s not so much what you learn that counts, but how fast you learn it.
You are your own greatest asset. Put your time, effort, and money into training, grooming, and encouraging your greatest asset.
Your Self Development Plan
A New Year hails a new beginning for most of us. Some may resolve to quit smoking, lose weight, get a new job or get our finances in order. By February, some of our resolves have vanished, mainly because we couldn’t get over ourselves. We’re our own worst enemies when it comes to change.
What most of us need is a plan that we can understand and stick to, through all of the hurdles, temptations and stress that enter our lives. This Self Development Plan contains five basic elements that you’ll need to overcome yourself and win the battles to take you to ultimate success. The elements are:
1.Spiritual
You don’t have to be religious to be a spiritual person. When a person has spiritual strength within, they have a built in belief system in themselves that will propel them on no matter what the problem.
2.Habits
We all have some habits we’d like to rid ourselves of, but some habits are debilitating and affect many areas of our lives in a negative way. For example, smoking is a habit that keeps us away from others and damages our health. Drinking too much can do the same.
3.Stress
Too much stress in our lives can lead to depression and anxiety and take a toll on our health. Find a way to control stress and you’ve found a key element toward positive self-development.
4.Relationships
There are many types of relationships in our lives – family, spouse or love interest, friends, money, co-workers and even food. Until we address the toxic relationships in our lives that keep us from success and positive self-development, we’ll be lacking in that part of our lives.
5.Body/Mind
As you care for your body – so you care for your mind. Without exercise, the proper diet, avoiding chemicals and other contaminates in your life, the body doesn’t function as it should – and neither does your mind.
As you take this journey of Self Development, turn inward for answers. You’ll find that there are some that you’ve always known for sure, and some that will be a big surprise. Keep a journal about your progress and setbacks, and learn about yourself in everything you strive to do.
Awaken Your Spiritual Guide
A spiritual guide isn’t like a genie in a bottle. But it can be magical when you know how to develop the spiritual guide within so that you and you alone are in control of your destiny.
In Rhonda Byrne’s best-selling book, ‘The Secret,’ she illustrates how your life experiences are created by you. You’re the one who controls your thoughts – which ones will make a positive impression on you and which will set you back. The object is to become so absorbed with the positive thoughts that negative thoughts can’t enter.
It’s completely your choice as to which thoughts you’re going to let enter your mind and take control – for minutes, hours, days or for the rest of your life. Your life’s spiritual experience depends on which you choose
Inevitably, negative thoughts will creep into your mind when you least expect it, and that’s where practice is key to changing those thoughts back into positive ones that you and you alone will harbor.
How to Control Your Thoughts
Being able to successfully control your thoughts so that you can control your life from within is one of the best ways to awaken your spiritual