This article is a short story of the struggle that life can present and how it aligns with personal development.

A young man that had grown up with taking on new things developed a real love for adventure and uniqueness.  He was always comfortable doing things that others dare not do.  Some of these things were in regular activities like hobbies, sports and school.  School was easy since the teachers told him everything he needed and quickly realized that if he actually paid attention the content was easy to digest and understand.  This was especially true, as he was a audible learner so quickly picked up on the classroom teachings.  Sure, he had some learning talent and inspiration to start well in school but this become a much larger cascade effect.  In his case, school became easier and easier and it only continued to build his confidence and learning skills.  Doing well in school and learning quickly was his first obvious experience with going against the grain.  Others struggled to learn and had a hard time in school and that seemed to be the general theme for the masses.  This independent style he had in learning added more to his confidence and he continued to develop a sense of self that didn’t fit into the mass mentality.

In going against the grain and knowing he could learn quickly, he also challenged himself to develop that skill in new uncommon sports, hobbies and skills.  Each of these presented a challenge to overcome and he developed an internal motivation to tackle any challenge head on and with full force to quickly overcome it and move past it.  Years went by mastering this skill and going against the grain of society’s seemingly normal outlook that life is bleak and tough.  He would have no part of that however, every challenge was welcomed and he continually overcame adversity with hard work, dedication and that massive motivation that was built up inside him to grow and conquer whatever he faced.  All this made him feel even more confident and satisfied by experiencing many successes in life through achievement.  He chased more and more achievements and as years started to pass, realized that the achievements were leaving him less and less content and that success had to be more than this.  He started to know that success was more than this but never realized what he was missing or what he was needing in order to have that.  For a some time, the confidence he had built up inside surfaced as arrogance and egotism which quickly impacted his influence on others and success was not something he could grasp when it came to his influence with others or even with himself.  Influence with himself is really one’s ability to change them self and grow.

Finally with the support of close friends, a deep spiritual journey and a number of significant events and training courses, he was fortunately enough to face the bitter truth which would reveal to him that his confidence had been shielding him from seeing what was really important in his life.  In fact, he had so much to discover about himself that he literally felt like a different person.  He changed drastically and stepped away from directly chasing success and started applying his learning skills to learning more about his influence on others and how to interact, work with and to connect with others at a deeper level.  It wasn’t until he was able to get past the confidence shield that self-discovery was even available to him.

So, with having a new appreciation for no limits learning, it became a much more valuable area in life and the realization that the best things to learn and experience are only available when he gets past his own limits, whether they are known or not.  Often the limiting beliefs are unknown without stepping out of the common safety box we live in and seek out adversity, challenges and all the other skinny branches of life.  He put this into action and started taking on new things not previously explored and putting his opinions on the back burner in order to have a more open mind for new activities and connections with people.  It was in these new adventures, new challenges and areas previously unexplored in life that really helped him to enjoy more, learn more and experience the best things in life.

With all these changes, the change itself actually becomes the journey of his life, since the value of change becomes more and more apparent he’s realized that it is the one factor that limits people more than anything else.  His own shift has changed him, created new beliefs around the fact that change is required to create opportunities, experiences and improvements in life and should not be avoided.  If improvements come about from change, then to improve is to change.  Both for himself as a person and in how he can impact the world, these beliefs have changed and the fear and limiting beliefs around it have faded away and completely out of mind and consideration.  His now strong beliefs in the ability to change is what makes improvement and personal development easier for him.  And he knows this is necessary to impact the world.  It’s this ability to go against the grain, learn from it and eliminate the fears of facing new challenges and instead learning from them.  This same belief bleeds out to the process of changing the world and improving it as well.

Morals of the story:

1. Success should never be measured by self achievement or at a single point in time
2. Confidence is the biggest shield against self discovery
3. The “skinny branches” in life are where the fruit is
4. The belief of change enables changing the world

Posted by Mike King under Success | 20 Comments »

Change is obviously a huge part of personal development as you can’t truly develop without change.  You can learn, you can gain knowledge, but you don’t really develop without putting those things into practice where you develop your character, your relationships, or work or some part of your life.  I always strive to put more than just the learning aspect in my articles and the biggest differentiators that I have learned in realizing personal development is that of taking action.  And action creates change.

Start Small

Change is tough.  It scares people and when we are satisfied with life, it threatens to break whatever certainty we have in keeping that satisfaction.  Personal development challenges that by looking at driving change to improve oneself and to better our lives and the experiences we create in life.  Whether you are a master change agent or an individual of daily habit afraid to try anything new, the only way to create any method of change for personal development is to start small and work up to bigger and bigger changes.  For those just starting to explore change and personal development for the first time, simple ideas or change are the best way to start.  Focus on thinking of the positives from change and what you can accomplish once you have made it.  Think about what you will have, how you’ll feel when you accomplish that first change and how it motivate you.  Perhaps it will give you specific feelings of pleasure or happiness you don’t have without it.

Starting small can happen simply by looking first at those ideas.  The way you think about change is really a crucial step and unfortunately it’s often overlooked.  Just imagine yourself where the change has already occurred and think about the future with that change in place.  This visualization you create is the first small yet crucial step in making change happen through action.  Changing the way to think about change and looking forward to what you will have from making change, even before doing it, is an action in your mind that will enable so much more.

Practice those thoughts of change, visualizing the great things you will have and the next small thing to do to implement change is to simple decide that yes, you do in fact want that change.  Reinforce your desire for it and keep reminder yourself of the pleasure you will have by getting it.  Perhaps you will also avoid some pain you experience now by NOT making that change.  If so, the promise of avoiding that pain by making the change can further enhance the desire you have to make the change.  All of this and you really haven’t DONE anything yet.  Start small.

Building Confidence

From the desirable change you’ve now imagined in your mind you’ve got to convert that desire into something stronger.  You need to make a decision to get the change.  Depending on how committed you make yourself to your decisions, this might be a powerful factor or a weak one.  It still makes an impact once you commit and decide to make it happen.  The strongest way to do this is to write it down and share it with a friend or loved one.  Share it to make your commitment stronger.  With that commitment on paper and in the minds of others, its time you set out and take action.  Make the first step that leads toward the change.  Just as before, start small and build upwards.  There are many ways to progress your steps from simple to small. These won’t apply to all change but they do provide a list of ideas from simple to more complex.

• Tell someone about the change you visualized
• Use pictures to visually represent the change you want by creating a poster or picture
• Use daily affirmations about the change in place
• Create a list of steps or goals that lead you to the change
• Tackle one change each day to work towards the change
• Remind yourself and reward yourself for progress made

The best thing about progress in change is that it builds confidence.  Gaining confidence create momentum which allows you to take on larger and larger actions, leading to bigger results.

As you see this progress, your confidence continues to grow and it’s a cascade effect.  This process might be over a period of days or years, it depends on the individual.  However, recognizing the progress and the change will always build confidence.

Realizing Continual Change

As you experience changes through personal development, you begin to go through periods a significant change and often one change will lead to another.  This is a great aspect of personal development, because change itself will sometimes revealing new opportunity or inspire another area in your life.  When these start to happen, you’ll end up with changes want to make that overlap each other in time.  As you see more progress, and continue to ramp up the changes you desire and enjoy the pleasure of achievement, you’ll begin to close the gap and see that you are really going through continual change.  Continual change is more than many repeated cycles of change that you intentionally perform, it begins to go much deeper inside one self without having to intentionally do so.

At this point, your subconscious becomes more and more activated by the continual change your experiencing and you’ll start to realize the changes are no longer happening only from your conscious ideas but there also starting to happen with your awareness, with your understanding, and even your fundamental beliefs.  Personally, I found that this new subconscious activity forms conscious thought, questions and a desire to explore it further.  So this realization comes full circle if you once again decide to make a change and carry it through.

Mastering Change

Mastery is a wonderful word.  It implies taking a skill to the furthest level and being able to do it easily, repeatedly and every time with excellence.  Mastering anything takes years of practice and dedication. Mastering a skill typically has a finite amount to learn and practice in order to gain that level of repeated excellence.  Once you reach that level, you can maintain it without struggling and it really becomes automatic.

Change however, is more complex than an ordinary skill.  Change is never finite because every single change you make will always be unique and have its own set of obstacles to overcome.  Improving your ability to change though makes you more flexible and adaptable.  Mastering change would mean that you can take on any change in life easily and do it well every time. Mastery means that change becomes so easy you simple need to make that choice and decide to change something and because of the mastering in change, it will happen one way or another with no further contemplation necessary.  Countless practicing, years of training, conditioning the body and mind to follow are all what leads to and creates mastery.  Eventually, just the decision itself becomes all that is needed as a catalyst to make the change happen.  That is complete mastery in my mind.  This is of course subjective but what a fantastic goal to have.  To be able to adapt to any circumstances, to change oneself for the better whenever the opportunity arises simply by making that decision and then to have continual changes bringing challenge, joy and satisfaction to each and every day in life!

Personal development has that very thing to offer and even though it may be an audacious goal, these steps for change allow us to come ever closer to mastering change, all we have to do is start small, take action and everything else builds on that.

Posted by Mike King under Personal | 12 Comments »

Author: Diana Whitney and Amanda Trosten-Bloom

As I’ve learned about leadership and personal development, I’ve learned how much these areas are really just all about change.  Changing yourself first and then looking to inspire and provoke change in others as well.  Recently, I’ve discovered, written about and become deeply involved with another such change.  A process called Appreciative Inquiry that is all about instilling organizational and community change.  I wrote a couple articles about Appreciative Inquiry when I first started learning about it and so if you haven’t read those, definitely jump back and take a look at those to understand a bit more about what appreciative inquiry is.  This book covers it as well, but the review I’ve written skips over much of that introductory material and gets to some of what I found to be more impactful once the basics were already understood.

Appreciative Inquiry – Introduction

Appreciative Inquiry – Tools and Methods

What this book has to offer is an in depth description of appreciative inquiry and the main steps typically needed in planning or hosting any kind of an appreciative inquiry.  There is so much content in this book I’m going to outline a few specific areas that I feel really bring out the value of appreciative inquiry.

Fully Affirmative

Focus on drawing out the best instead of problems

Best example of this in the book is an example from British Petroleum’s ProCare (a US auto repair business) that was conducting customer satisfaction surveys.  There was a downward trend occurring as soon as they company began the surveys.  They were using the 5% of dissatisfied customers from the satisfaction surveys in an attempt to fox those areas and address any problem areas in focus groups assigned for improving the surveys.  It seemed impossible to improve when the discussions and messages were about unwanted cases of customer feedback (or the problems in customer satisfaction).  An appreciative inquiry team of consultants was brought in to help assess this.  Despite much skepticism, they setup the same focus groups to look at 100% satisfied customer surveys only and the results were stunningly different.  The customer satisfaction ratings reversed immediately and started an upward trend.  This affirmative stance of appreciative inquiry created the environment needed to restore high levels of customer satisfaction and was only possible by exploring the best of customer satisfaction and to continue to focus on what was working.  This is the whole premise of appreciative inquiry.

Inquiry Based

Unconditionally positive questions are crafted as part fo the process to ensure that the nature of the questions brings a shift towards the hopeful and positive elements in any response.  Inquiry is a carefully selected word in this process as it implies there is a search and willingness to discover and learn.  Inquiry questions do not lead to a anything in particular, they are about sharing experiences and thoughts or opinions on a topic.  They have an openness that shows a genuine interest in the response which deeply engages people.

Improvisational

The third main trait of an appreciativeinquiry is that it is improvisational.  It is loosely structured and has guiding principles only to devleop and get results from any appreciative process.  It is itself guided by questions and so those involved must respond and tailor their interactions and systems specific to that inquiry.  This makes every appreciative inquiry unique and it is that which keeps growing the appreciative inquiry knowledge based with new tools and techniques learn that bring out the vital elements of people and organizations.

Principles of AI

Another element that was new to me in this book was the outline of the 8 principles of appreciative inquiry.  These principles have been derived from the original creators of appreciative inquiry and by the evolution from experiences in conducting inquiries with large scale organization and community change efforts.  Without describing each in detail, which the book does well, here are the 8 principles:

1. The Constructionist Principle – Words Create Worlds
2. The Simultaneity Principle – Inquiry Creates Change
3. The Poetic Principle – We Can Choose What We study
4. The Anticipatory Principle – Image Inspires Action
5. The Positive Principle – Positive Questions Lead to Positive Change
6. The Wholeness Principle – Wholeness Brings Out The Best
7. The Enactment Principle – Acting ‘As If’ Is Self-Fulfilling
8. The Free Choice Principle – Free Choice Liberates Power

The authors cover some history of Appreciative Inquiry, its creators and origins.  They also explore much about how it has been applied since its inception.  There are large sections with great detail about the 4 main stages of appreciative inquiry:

• Discovery: Appreciative interviews and more
• Dream: Visions and voices of the future
• Design: Giving form to values and ideals
• Destiny: Inspired action and improvisation

Why Appreciative Inquiry Works?

The final chapter is called, “Why Appreciative Inquiry Works?”.  I loved this chapter as it not only summarizes appreciative inquiry with evidence and continued stories of application, but it also helps solidify the new beliefs around the thinking, words and actions required and what makes it so special and powerful as a process and engaging tool.  For some, it enables personal and collective power, others it enhances self esteem and self-expression.  It makes a lasting change and can permanently affect a person.  The book then covers that there are 6 freedoms that appreciative inquiry enables and how the process liberates power in those freedoms:

1. The freedom to be known in relationships
2. The freedom to be heard
3. The freedom dream in community
4. The freedom to choose to contribute
5. The freedom to act with support
6. The freedom to be positive

Concluding Thoughts

In conclusion, its hard to express how useful appreciative inquiry can be and what an impact it makes in an organization or community.  I’ve had the wonderful experience of seeing it first hand however in my own work and am honored to be our company’s appreciative inquiry champion steering our process and engaging the whole company with the various stages, tools and interactions.

Its been a great experience so far, has no end in sight, and definitely already shifting our organization towards what is called, “life centered organization”.  I’m excited to continue to learn more about appreciative inquiry and to see how else I can apply it in my life and other communities I’m involved in.  I encourage you to learn about appreciative inquiry as well and bring it into your organization or community.  I’m positive that you be happy that you did!

Posted by Mike King under Book Reviews | 12 Comments »

I’ve been thinking and writing a lot more about creativity lately and today my thoughts brought me to the subject of art.  Art is one of those things that seems so subjective and person its hard to really define.  Most people when they think of art, think of the traditional styles of art, like drawings and paintings, perhaps music or even sculptures.  To me, art is much more than that, it is not in the things you produce as an artist but actually in the process of creation.  Art, therefore, is really anything that is created.  It is still subjective since it is a personal reflection or process to create something but it is wrapped around the process of creation, not the end product.  The creation itself is what drives an artist to do what they do, not only the end product itself.

What is Your Art?

What led me onto this subject is my graphics business.  Its a business that lets me create visual content and end up with an animated 3D piece of art.  I used to have much more desire to make this a full time career because it was my most significant area of creativity and art in my life and I love it.  Still do in fact.  The difference now is that I’ve learned that there are many other areas in my life where I can be just as creative and find art in that creative process as well.  This includes my writing here at LearnThis.ca and it includes my engineering work in design, architecture and managing of people.  The art is in all of that as well.  More importantly I’ve found art in creative actions with my thinking, my feeling, my relationships and my spirituality.  All these areas now I find myself using my creativity to produce change.  Change in myself and change in others around me.  That realization lets me look at creativity and art in everything I do, not just in a few fixed products or actions.

The Art of Change

Think of all your actions, all your passions, everything you spend time in life creating.  Maybe your art is not in some traditional sense but instead in the art of change?  I know that personal development and life learning require change and if change can be sparked by creativity, then embrace your creative actions, extend them in all directions of your life and see the results in your own personal art of change!

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 20 Comments »

This article is part of a series about the 7 ages of a business, an entrepreneur perspective, initially published at eDragonu.ro . The remaining 6 articles are published as guest posts on 6 other fine personal development and business blogs. You will find links to them at the end of this article.

Time For A Change

Exhaustion is by far the most difficult stage to accept from an entrepreneur perspective. Exhaustion happens when your market is so crowded that you can barely keep your profit and clients, when your employees can switch instantly from you to your competition (and vice versa), and when the market share is calculated in fraction of percents.

Exhaustion is usually the natural consequence of leadership. Every process in the world is a cyclic one and business can’t be an exception. After a high rise, a lower altitude will follow, after a huge inspiration, expiration will follow. These are metaphors for a rather harsh reality: during this stage your efforts will seem huge and your reward almost inexistent. It’s extremely difficult to accept exhaustion especially after the leadership stage when everything seemed to happen effortless.

From an entrepreneur standpoint, the exhaustion stage is much a like an old, small shirt. It simply doesn’t look good on you. You grew up and your shirt isn’t fitting anymore. Takes time to understand and accept that because we humans have a tendency to attach to our past images. An entrepreneur is often identifying himself with his business and can’t accept its decline. I know I did this mistake.

What To Avoid

Although you reached the end of the journey, there are still some things you can do to make it worse than it need to be. Here’s what I found better to avoid.

Salvage

The first reaction at this stage is trying to salvage your business. Although you came through all the stages, from enthusiasm to leadership, it seems that things aren’t running quite smoothly as before, so, you need to change something, you need to save your business. Well, you can’t. At least, you can’t go back to the leadership stage. Trying to salvage the business will often lead to risky solutions and will make it more unstable than before. Salvage will do more harm than good at this stage. The salvation process is mostly at the entrepreneur’s psychological level, the business is following a normal pattern.

Depression

That’s serious. Depression is one of the most common consequences for an entrepreneur reaching the exhaustion stage. You’re so overwhelmed with guilt and frustration, you’re trying so hard to come back on the game, you’re feeling so sad because the leadership days are over, that your psychological circuits can break. Depression is pretty common among entrepreneurs, although the images of entrepreneurs aren’t showing it. And it’s in the final stage of a business that is most likely for the depression to appear. Well, be prepared.

Conclusions

Jumping to conclusions is also one of the most common mistakes in the exhaustion stage of a business. Been there, done that, I don’t want to do it anymore. You’re analyzing your success level by the current business level. If the business is going so slow, you tend to think your success is not for real. That’s jumping to conclusion. You forgot how much you accomplished so far and tend to minimize your efforts. This is why is so important to assess your business experience during the leadership stage. Exhaustion is natural, but so is leadership, so stick with leadership and just accept exhaustion.

What To Do

Every crisis is in fact an opportunity. The business exhaustion phase is usually a powerful trigger for several really liberating activities. Here are some of them.

Exit

During the exhaustion stage and entrepreneur is almost forced to make an exit. I’m not talking about an investor or manager perspective here, which might be completely different, but about the entrepreneur’s desire to ignite things, to start something for scratch, to create. Exhaustion stage is like the click for a new adventure. I never met any serious entrepreneur who “survived” an exhaustion stage. Keep in mind that an “exit” can be done in million ways: you can sell all, just a part, remain investor, silent partner, etc.

Delegate It Big Time

If you’re not going to sell, which is highly improbable, the next best thing is to delegate it big time. Find somebody to run the business for you. It could be a person, another business (like in integrating your business with another one) it can be a group, it can be anything, as long as it gives you the freedom to start again. Delegating is not “exit”, if you’re delegating the business you’ll still have to exert some control over it, but at least you won’t be taking it as serious as before. Delegating wasn’t an option for me, after I hit the exhaustion stage I decided the best thing for me was to sell it completely. Your mileage may vary.

Accept It

That’s the most difficult yet most rewarding step you can take during this stage. Accepting that your business, your initial idea, has hit a certain level and it won’t go further will open your eyes to new roads. You can’t really run again if you don’t accept that you finished something, there will always be some lose ends that will make your running slow. Just accepting that you’ve done everything was to be done and you’re ready to start something new will be a great gift for yourself. Acceptance is the door to your new adventures. Entrepreneurship is not about money, it never was, it’s all about adventure.

Run Again

That’s the final stage of your business. It was a great journey. You started with enthusiasm, continued with a lot of trust and naivety, become attentive and then hit the maturity level. With courage and inspiration you expanded beyond your imagination and finally become a leader. It was an incredible journey.

There is only one thing that could level with that experience. And that is your next journey.

***

You can find the remaining 6 ages of your business on these fine personal development and business blogs:

• The Enthusiasm Business Age @ Attraction Mind Map
• The Naivety Business Age @ SmallBizBee
• The Attention Business Age @ Advanced Life Skills
• The Maturity Business Age @ Steven Aitchinson
• The Expansion Business Age @ Rat Race Trap
• The Leadership Business Age @ My Wife Quit Her Day Job

Guest Author:Dragos Roua is passionate about success, and he blogs at DragosRoua to share his insights about life’s many lessons and his travels and discoveries within it.  You can subscribe to his blog with his RSS feed here or catch him on Twitter @dragosroua

Posted by Mike King under Business | 16 Comments »

A couple weeks ago I read an interesting article by Tim at A Daring Adventure about what the key to self development is and I felt a longer response was needed to explain my perspective here.

Kindness and Self Confidence

Tim wrote that he believes the key is being kind to yourself.  He mentioned how a number of actions you could do or learn or improve are then destroyed if you don’t be kind to yourself to prevent those.  Well I see the advantages when you are kind to yourself and there are certainly some truths in that but I’ve experienced the key to personal development is belief.

The Key is Belief

Belief feeds change and it even feeds your self confidence and so therefore, belief also feeds how you treat yourself, or your kindness to yourself so kindness cannot possible be the key to personal development.  I think it is belief.  I’ve experienced it personally and seen many others advance in personal development because of belief.  It has nothing to do with actions until there are actions to put in place.

Belief Is the Power to Change

Not only does belief change your thinking and attitude towards things with personal development, it directly impacts your ability to accept change, including building self confidence and being kind to yourself.  Personal development is changing and improving oneself and that starts at a different point, unique to every individual depending on where they are at in their lives.  This could be at a point in their life where change is desirable and being sought after like I suspect anyone working with a life coach would already be doing, yet it might also be starting with a person who is at a point with no desire, no self love and certainly not showing kindness to themselves.  That kindness won’t appear on its own and that kind of person requires a significant change in beliefs to step up and even hope for some kind of personal improvement.  The other thing I have seen is that a person can easily improve themselves without being kind in the process.  Some people can make drastic changes by hating the things they do and capturing pain to motivate themselves.  This clearly is not driven by kindness, it is driven by what they believe will change or what pleasures and pains impact their future.  So, this is all based on belief.

Belief Builds on Itself

As well, the more small improvements and accomplishments that a person experiences in developing themselves, the more and more they will believe future change is possible.  This allows beliefs to develop further and be strengthened for even more personal improvements.  Beliefs really have a simple, yet strong foundation that is based on expected pain and pleasure.  That impression and belief guides our decisions for action which includes any personal development actions.

Your Own Personal Development

All of this may be something you believe or not but I absolutely think it is worthwhile exploring and considering for your own improvements.  What beliefs do you have or lack to motivate you enough for the changes you want?  What are the pains and pleasures you associate with the things you’ve considered changing.  What people, experiences and influences are impacting and changing your beliefs?  Perhaps it’s those beliefs you need to analyze and change in order to progress with your own areas of personal development.  If you are interesting in exploring your pains, pleasures and beliefs further, please have a look at my Goal Setting Step – Setting and Identifying .

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 26 Comments »