IMPORTANCE OF SETTING PERSONAL GOALS
From our very childhood, we have been taught to focus on our careers and on getting a decent job. And for that we all set various professional goals, we work on our weaknesses and build different skills so that we can excel in our professional lives. But how many of us try to work on our personal skills. How many of us make an effort to improve our patience level, to control our anger and aggression, to become kind and empathic, or to improve our emotional intelligence.
Although our society puts a lot of reliance on improving our skillsets and talent but when it comes to personal skills, it expects us to learn these skills through our own mistakes and experiences. But the truth is you don’t always have to learn these skills after you commit mistakes. Instead just like other skills these skills can also be built. Howsoever bitter it may sound, in absence of these qualities we end up living a mundane life and the worst part is many people don’t even realize this and keep living in ignorance.
Things like patience, integrity, honesty, kindness, etc are skills, and since they are skills they can be built by us by deliberate efforts and consistent practice. But there are very few people who work on their personal skills. We underestimate the power of personal skills in making our lives better. And this is what differentiates successful people from ordinary people. People who succeed in reaching the pinnacle of their lives are people with a high level of patience, integrity, and EQ. All the great leaders that have ever existed on this earth are people possessing high-level EQ instead of high IQ. This is what makes them charismatic and this is how legends live their lives. They consistently work on their personal goals and improve the quality of their life. But they aren’t born with these skills rather they practice hard to build these skills.
WAYS TO BUILD PERSONAL SKILLS
Just like building professional skills, building personal skills also requires practice and time. But the first step must be to be aware of your weakness because many people don’t even know where they lack. One of the best ways to get aware of our weakness is by analyzing our day and by analyzing how we behaved in different situations throughout our day. How many times it happens that we regret shouting on our colleagues or we feel guilty after fighting with our friend on any trivial matter and although we feel guilty we repeat such behaviour. This is because we don’t reflect on our behaviour. So every day, you should take out time to reflect upon your action and behaviours. It might happen that you overreacted in some situations but after analyzing you may realize that you would have handled the situation differently. Analyze how you behaved in that situation and how can you behave if you come across the same situation. This practice can be very effective not only in getting aware of our shortcomings but also by reflecting we can prepare ourselves for facing any situation in the future.
So decide what are the qualities that you want to develop and set a goal to achieve those qualities. You can take the help of meditation, reading about charismatic leaders, watching ted-talks, etc. With consistent practice, you can easily develop these qualities.
We have been taught about the importance of IQ but rarely do we care about improving our EQ. How many times it happens that we take things personally and spoil our day because of our low EQ. Building professional skills are very important; they help us in making our career, they help us in earning money but personal skills are equally important, as they help us in improving the quality of our lives.
“IN LOOKING FOR PEOPLE TO HIRE, LOOK FOR THREE QUALITIES: INTEGRITY, INTELLIGENCE, AND ENERGY. AND IF THEY DON’T HAVE THE FIRST, THE OTHER TWO WILL KILL YOU” — WARREN BUFFETT