Self-Development: You Versus You

It’s about time I get this off my chest. How many losses will you have to take until you finally wake up to the massive load of potential you are sleeping on. The world is yours if you really take it on and try. You cannot lose if you try to put your best foot forward. What makes you great is when you continually compare yourself to who you were yesterday and strive to reach the next best version of yourself. We are flawed and some of us more than others, but what remains constant is the sacrifice we must make to achieve our goals.

Personally speaking, I had given up on my dreams because of my academic deficiencies and it was up until the last minute that I was saved from the darkness. I discovered the only way out is through. I was able to recollect myself and salvage what was left in my high school years and to my utter surprise, it was more than enough to be considered as an achievement. I look back to the choices I made, and I think to myself, “How easy it is to excel” and here are some of the guiding lines that shifted my mindset

Passion

This is the ability to love your work every day regardless of the challenges you are expected to face. Though not easy, it is totally worth it. With passion comes aggression, by aggression I mean the intensity at which you crave for success, which almost scares you, because you are all in. This should be the ‘why’ that makes you wake up and the same ‘why’ that gives you sleepless nights. Passion is the mother of all success bearing fruits.

Responsibility

Take on responsibility. Be accountable to yourself. Own up to your mistakes and failures, and through this, your life plan becomes easier to formulate as you have developed self-awareness. Do not be a slave to blame shifting and victimizing yourself which makes you look weak and incapable. Once you’ve identified these flaws that you think are massive (which are not), forgive yourself. Do not beat yourself up instead be on the same team with the person you see in the mirror every day. In my personal life, I had to adopt responsibility the day I became angry and ashamed of myself for failing my exams. I shall never forget that day. I had the urge to change my ways and one of the major ways my life changed was through the adoption of accountability and self-respect. The culmination of these two important factors brings about personal responsibility.

Coaching

Never underestimate the ability to have someone who can help you achieve your full potential. Not a therapist, not a mentor, but a coach. Someone who sees who you could be despite your present confusion or uncertainty. You never know what your upper limit is once you start succeeding and powerful coaching questions help you to shape yourself so that you can separate the wheat from the chaff in your own character. You have the answers inside you, but you may not have the right questions, but the coach has. A coach can help you find your own answers.

We battle ourselves each day and as a result we end up sabotaging our efforts. The combination of the factors addressed in this article should help you exploit your potential and to your surprise, once you take these steps, you’ll go on to unlock other success-bearing fruits in your life. Now I have marked the starting point in your life, let us get to the finish line. See you there?

Article by Justin Reno, 2^nd Year Bachelor’s in Financial Services Programme