How to Enhance your Overall Career and Personal Development through Self Development

To further your career, whether you are a Senior Leader, a newly appointed Manager or at the early to mid-stage of your career, it’s essential to continually support your growth on a personal and a professional level. This is also an important part of successful leadership; to ensure a leader continues to demonstrate great leadership, leads by example and truly adds value to an organisation, it is crucial they focus on their own self-development.

Focusing on your own development can not only help enhance your performance at work, but it can also significantly contribute to how you apply yourself, overcome challenge and build relationships outside of work. After a slight decline in the self-development market throughout the pandemic, the advancement and access of remote learning and the increased awareness around the benefits of self-development is growing the market. Marketdata estimates that the US self-improvement market is set to grow to $14 billion by 2025, a growth of 6%.

What is Self-development?

Self-development not only helps develop your areas of weakness, or skills you are keen to improve, it can also enhance your strengths and allow you to reach your full potential, enabling you to accelerate in areas you are already performing well. As part of the process, you may step out of your comfort zone and push yourself, this will not only boost your self-confidence, but it will also improve your overall self-awareness too.

At CSG Talent, we are global talent experts, and we support thousands of candidates across a wealth of industries to develop themselves and their careers at a high level. The insights and in-depth knowledge of our expert team is shared with Business Leaders and Senior Professionals to support their overall performance, decision making and self-development.

Here we share our top tips which will enable you to take small, but significant steps to enhance your self-development skills, personal development and how to develop self-confidence.

Review and Evaluate

Before you can move forward with self-development, it’s important to establish where you are currently and what you have achieved to date. The next step is to highlight your strengths and development areas. Having this insight and assessment of your individual development will allow you to make effective plans to enhance your overall growth. Consider the areas you are keen to focus on, the influential figures who inspire you and what you are looking to get out of development activities.

Goal Setting

What do you want to achieve and when do you want to achieve this by? Setting yourself goals that are time specific, no matter how big or small are great motivators to encourage and inspire you to achieve. Ensure you set yourself goals that are realistic and achievable, give yourself enough of a challenge to focus on without setting unrealistic goals posts which may end up being counter-productive. When you achieve your goals, make sure you celebrate your success and recognise your progress. Whether it’s doing this yourself, sharing with others or updating your online profile/CV to highlight achievements.

Eliminate Bad Habits

Many of us develop bad habits which impact our productivity and ability to grow, many of which are unconscious habits we are seemingly unaware of. Establish any bad habits you may have, development areas or processes/actions that could be carried out more effectively. Bad habits can be anything you feel stops you being productive or fulfilling your potential, or even habits that have a negative impact on your professional and personal life.

Create New Habits

Once you have successfully eliminated your bad habits, consider creating new habits. This could be related to your daily routine, encouraging yourself to wake up earlier to allow you the opportunity to do more with your day, or factoring in time to carry out activities you previously didn’t have time for. Creating a new routine can help you achieve your goals and create consistency and focus. It can take time to adjust to new habits, but in time once you’ve established a new routine, you will then reap the benefits.

Learn New Skills

We can all continue to learn, no matter how skilled or experienced we may be. Adopting a new skill can be hugely beneficial to self-development. Learning a new skill can be a great way to build self-confidence regardless of career stage, it’s a great addition to your bank of skills and the value you add in a role, while also developing yourself as an individual. Learning a new skill doesn’t necessarily have to be related to your professional career, it could be learning a new hobby, starting the process of learning a new language or increasing your awareness of specific topics.

Read and absorb information

Reading allows us the opportunity to learn, absorb new information and consider the adoption of new mindsets, approaches, and goals. The most intelligent and successful business leaders ensure they allow plenty of time for self-development and reading is a huge part of this. Reading not only opens your mind to new ideas and learning about particular topics or practical approaches to adopt, but it also contributes to increased focus and improved sleep. Overall, it can support your general wellbeing and ability to perform and succeed both in and outside of work.

Focus on What You Can Control

Having the ability to focus on elements of your professional and personal life you can control contributes to self-development. It’s about where you focus your energy, your time, and your brain power. Focus on situations, events and actions you can personally control and don’t place emphasis on factors beyond your control, this can be counterproductive.

Look After Yourself

It’s important to take care of your physical and mental health to support ongoing self-development. Considering the choices you make with your diet, drink in-take and physical exercise not only contributes to your physical health, but it also has a positive impact on your mental health and wellbeing. Create an exercise routine that results in you feeling energised and engaged to allow you to stay motivated and consistent. Everyone has individual preferences when it comes to self-care, it’s about finding the perfect balance for you as an individual, whether that be lifestyle, exercise regimes or what diet you adopt, all of which can impact your overall wellbeing.

Growth Mindset

By considering all factors outlined, you will have the opportunity to adopt a growth mindset. A growth mindset will help you as an individual and as a leader which will support the success of an organisation in turn. Having the belief that you can develop your skills, abilities and knowledge, no matter how far in your career you may be, is to have a growth mindset. When approached with a challenge, objection or barrier, an individual with a growth mindset will see this as an opportunity to grow, adapt and learn. Leaders with a growth mindset will allow both businesses and employees the opportunity to grow, learn and evolve too.

Self-development is for everyone, regardless of career stage or life cycle. According to Microsoft’s latest ‘Work Trend Index’, many workers feel they need to leave a company to develop their skills. It’s important for businesses to facilitate a work environment focused on development, progression and growth. If an individual feels they are lacking opportunities to develop themselves within an organisation, they are more likely to seek an opportunity elsewhere.

CSG Talent Best Self Development Book Recommendations:

·        The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen R Covey

·        Eat That Frog – Brian Tracy

·        Smarter, Faster, Better – Charles Duhigg

·        Mindsight – Daniel J Siegel

·        Manifest – Roxie Nafousi

·        Who Moved My Cheese: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life - Spencer Johnson

·        Getting Things Done – David Allen

·        Daring Greatly – Brene Brown

At CSG Talent, we continually support the development of our employees and encourage self-development both in and outside of the workplace. Through regular appraisals, performance reviews and comprehensive career paths, our teams can access additional training both in-house and through external training providers. We recognise the importance of development on both a professional and personal level and see first-hand the benefits individuals reap through self-development.

If you’re keen to explore current career opportunities available at CSG Talent and to hear more about life at CSG, click here.