Creating a personal development style could potentially raise awareness of what can hinder your performance and success in life. According to John Rohn, “if we start the process of change by developing a plan, doing something different in this next year than we did the previous year, it won't matter how small those efforts start.

Rohn says further that, ''I’ve also found that income rarely exceeds personal development. Sometimes income takes a lucky jump, but unless you learn to handle the responsibilities that come with it, it will usually shrink back to the amount you can handle”. Essentially, the degree of influence of a sudden fortune over personal development can’t be sustained without a clearly defined and pragmatic approach of how to improve on yourself.

“If someone hands you a million dollars, you’d better hurry up and become a millionaire. A very rich man once said, “If you took all the money in the world and divided it equally among everybody, it would soon be back in the same pockets it was before.”

It is hard to keep that which has not been obtained through personal development.

So, here’s the great axiom of life: to have more than you've got, become more than you are.

This is where you should focus most of your attention. Otherwise, you just might have to contend with the axiom of not changing, which is: Unless you change how you are, you’ll always have what you've got.

Personal development can be actualised through deliberate personal responsibilities from your experience. You can change by developing and following through result-oriented plan on how to do things differently.

It is not only about what happens to you that predictably determines your future but what lessons you have learned from your experience and how you use the experience to improve on yourself. In order words, you might have had a negative experience however, the important thing is to subsequently leverage on it by developing plan on how to do things differently. This is what personal development is all about.

Learn from your mistakes, be agile and move forward. Lead with agility and embrace change. You will not only become positively different through personal development, you will also become the valuable difference. There is this saying that “the best discovery is self-discovery”.

Witten by Ayodele Ojo

Source: Adapted from The Miracle of Personal Development by Jim Rohn