Starting on a self-improvement journey for personal development can appear daunting as often we feel that something in our lives just isn’t going quite right. If you feel like this, then it’s a good idea to sit down and take stock of where you are with all aspects of your life.
At Aim Higher Training we encourage our clients and students to start with reviewing key areas of life using our free online course Spotlight on Work-Life Balance.
Life Wheel
We start with some basics and encourage everyone to review key areas of their lives and score themselves out of 10 for each section. Our life wheel is divided into eight sections:
Health, Well-being, and Self-care
Home
Finance and Money
Family
Social, Recreation and Friends
Spirituality
Love and Relationship
Personal Growth
By grading yourself out of 10 in each area you may start to see some glaring areas that might contribute to your feelings of dissatisfaction. As a guide, we say that the lower number the more important it is to address any issues. But as a general rule, a 7 or below is a good guide to show you any areas for concern and identify areas for self-improvement.
You can read more about this in one of our recent blog posts 70 Simple Ways to Find Work-Life Balance
Work Wheel
The same applies for the work wheel and with this one we divide it into these sections:
Work-Life Balance
Job Satisfaction
Income
Working Relationships
Working Environment
Performance
Work Culture
Career Development
The same approach applies and low scores around poor work culture or environment can demonstrate the core reasons around negative feelings about work. Identifying the reasons for these may be around areas such as low performance or lack of motivation and once identified, these can be more readily understood.
Once these self-assessment exercises have been completed, we can start to identify patterns, the impact of weaker areas on others and start to identify how areas of dissatisfaction can be improved.
At Aim Higher Training once our clients have the results of the free online Spotlight on Work-Life Balance course. They can start to build more information about themselves by working through some further self-assessment exercises.
Self Improvement & Personal Growth
Our next free online course Spotlight on Personal Growth encourages our clients to work through a personal SWOT exercise. This looks at our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and encourages people to look at themselves with honesty and apply it to all the areas. What tends to happen is that some patterns start to appear. For example, if someone has a lack of self-confidence as a weakness. This can impact other areas of life such as feeling awkward in social situations or at work, by not speaking up in team meetings or dodging making presentations at work.
We then offer a skills matrix based on professional skills across such areas as personal effectiveness, communication, and people skills. By working through this self-assessment exercise patterns can emerge and often these link to the personal SWOT exercise.
With these self-assessment exercises, anyone can start to develop a picture of themselves, so they can start to see areas for self-improvement and personal development opportunities. This information can start to feed into personal and professional growth plans in our Spotlight on Making a Plan course, where aims and objectives can be determined, and action plans devised.
Our free online courses are designed to guide anyone towards identifying personal and professional goals, to start working towards under their own steam. But for anyone who feels they need a bit of support, please get in touch and we can book a free introductory coaching session to help you get started on your self-improvement journey.