How to Grow Personally and Professionally

By Gregg Gregory

With each passing year, our pace is going to increase even more. How can we manage to keep our lives sane in the midst of these hectic times? One of the most important ways to maintain sanity is to develop our own personal growth. Motivation is a lot like taking your morning shower. Why do you take a morning shower? Because the one you took yesterday wore off? Our personal motivation has to come from within. Others can only guide you in the right direction.

Here are my 11 steps to your own personal growth that can stimulate your mind body and soul. By performing these regularly, your own motivation as well as others around you will increase. Just think how good you feel when you do something for someone else. By practicing these 11 steps every day, you can dramatically change both your professional and personal life.

1) Think First of the Other Person: This is the foundation—the first step for getting along with others. It is the only truly difficult accomplishment you must make. Do this and the rest will be a breeze.

2) Build up the Other Person's Sense of Importance: When we make the other person seem less important, we frustrate one of the deepest urges. Allow them to feel equality or superiority, then you can easily get along with them.

3) Respect the Other Person's Personal Rights: Respect the other person's right to be different from you. Two personalities are never molded by the exact same forces.

4) Give Sincere Appreciation: If you think someone has done something well, never hesitate to recognize them. Warning: This does not mean promiscuous use of obvious flattery. Flattery with intelligent people gets exactly what it deserves: contempt for the egotistical "phony" who stoops to it.

5) Eliminate the Negative: Criticism seldom does what the user intended it to do. It invariably creates resentment, which will ultimately work to your disadvantage well into the future.

6) Avoid Openly Trying to Reform People: Everybody knows they're not perfect. However, they do not want someone else trying to correct their faults. If you want to improve a person, help them to embrace a higher working goal. In turn, they'll raise their own standard higher than you ever could.

7) Try to Understand the Other Person: When you begin to see why others are the way they are, you cannot help but to get along better with them.

8) Check the First Impressions: Follow Abraham Lincoln's famous instruction: "I do not like that man, therefore, I shall get to know him better."

9) Take Care of the Little Details: Watch your smile, tone of voice, how you use your eyes, the manner in which you greet people, the use of nicknames. Remember faces, names and dates. These little things will set you apart from the others you come in contact with.

10) Develop a Genuine Interest in People: You cannot successfully apply the foregoing suggestions unless you have a sincere desire to like, respect, and be helpful to others. Conversely, you cannot build a genuine interest in people until you have experienced the pleasure of working with them in an atmosphere characterized by mutual trust and respect.

11) Never Give Up On Yourself: As Eleanor Roosevelt said, "No one can make you feel inferior without your permission." You do truly have the power to succeed if you believe you can.

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