If you hear the term Personal Development what do you think of, a famous encyclopaedia devotes 116 sections to the term so no wonder there is confusion. It is a popular phrase used by ‘Gurus’ to call the masses to heel and sometimes to line their own pockets with more money at the expense of the many.

We were born with unrealized potential and most strive through their lives to make them better through education and job prospects but is this what we call personal development?

So just what is Personal Power or Personal Development training?

It is very much a mental thing, trying to be the best person you can be is one of the power driving forces to help you achieve goals. You look at other people, some of them as role models, and try to integrate some of their personality into your own. But this is just not practical and is the reason many people feel a sense of failure when they try personal development training courses and goal setting tools. They can read personal development books attend personal development seminars but they will never be like their role models.

The reality of your life today is a reflection of the sum of your thoughts until this day.

So if your current situation is the result of all the thoughts that you have, and you have on average 50,000 personal thoughts a day, some people have one thought 50,000 times! Personal Development is all about changing what you do now and getting different results than you have had in your past?

Most people simply want to improve their quality of life they do not need to earn millions to do it; Perhaps all your past experiences have shown a lack of results, so is it still possible to realize all of your personal dreams and aspirations? Since childhood most of us have been held in check by parents, relatives, teachers and peer groups, their best intentions to save us from disappointment have been geared toward telling us not to expect too much in life we will only be disappointed.

No wonder self styled professional ‘Gurus’ earn vast fortunes establishing seminars, telling us what we should be doing to improve our lot, without really coaching us how to do it, well that is in the next power lesson which costs an extra $x,000 and helps keep them rich and us poor. Thirsting for the next secret advertised will not get you that personal power found in self improvement .

Whilst it is true to say that whatever level of personal development you are at you do need a framework in order to know if improvement has actually occurred, what you do not need is the latest ‘Whizz bang super-dooper piece of software that will power you to smart goal achievement’.

They tell you that they know something you do not and that is why you feel frustrated at your lack of personal development you will feel compelled to pull out more and more of your hard earned money to discover the secret, when there is no secret anyway.

Just as a building need a strong framework so do you to keep on track? Well you need some sort of smart goal or benchmark to aim for because you need to define the end-point, you need plans and strategies to measure and assess your progress toward the end, and you need milestones set out so that you can reward yourself for making progress on the way. In every journey you need some sort of feedback to know just where you are and are you on track.

Would you set off on a long unfamiliar journey without first looking at a map for guidance.Even then you would set milestones on the route to measure how far you had covered and how far you had to go. Keep your money in your pocket I can tell you all you need to know from my past experience of personal development work.

Well there is one key to successful personal development, smart goal setting, motivation call it what you will let me tell you what it is….?

Your childhood can teach you everything you need to know to develop your life in career and social situations. It is a shame that we forget to go back!

What is that?

You may ask surely we need as the good book says in 1 Corinthians chpt 13 vv11 “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, and reasoned like a child. I gave up childish things when I became a man.” This is true but there is a trait of childhood we should never have left behind – The trait to ask questions that are conflict managing type questions in our quest for knowledge to achieve our life goals.

You may think that you still ask questions every day, but what sort of questions are they the conflict managing type. Sometimes you ask internal questions such as when there is a surprise knock at the door you ask inside your head “I wonder who that is?”

Now go on admit it you talk to yourself. You could probably at this moment be saying inside your head, “No I don’t, do I?”

When the phone rings have you ever caught yourself saying out loud, “I wonder who is ringing at this time of night?”

There are of course those natural external questions such as when you meet someone and ask, “How are you?” most of the time you do not wait for a reply as you do not really ask questions to get a reply but out of common courtesy.

Now compare those questions to when a children ask questions, they almost demands answers by using questions that start with, who, what, where, when, how and why. The cry out for answers to increase their knowledge by asking open questions and demanding the answers.

In adulthood we feel the fear that in asking conflict managing questions, we appear ignorant, how many times when you have been listening at a seminar or other training course and you have nodded intelligently when you haven’t got the foggiest notion what the speaker was talking about.

In listening to a speaker you place your own interpretation on the words you think you hear, the problem is the speaker also places his interpretation on the words which may be different from yours leading to misunderstanding and conflict.

Your misinterpretation is often caused by the workings of your inner mind, when you hear a word or collection of words, your inner mind needs to explore the recesses of your memory to find those words in your knowledge base and then set them against the experience you were subjected to that placed a meaning on those words into your memory.

The speaker also in searching for the correct words to use lets his inner mind search the recesses of his memory to uncover an experience he had related to or exactly the same as what he was trying to convey through his words. If you have a similar experience in your past lives there is harmony and understanding but if you have a totally different experience there is misunderstanding a need for conflict resolution.

Let me give you an example. What image springs into your mind when you hear the word ‘pen’? We think in pictures not words. Let us say that you are using or have just used a biro pen, you would probably see the image of that pen in your mind, however, if my experience was to always use a fountain pen that is the image I was trying to portray through my words.

Now the resolving conflict that may occur between the interpretation of the word pen may not be catastrophic, but unless we ask conflict managing questions; when we do not understand what is being said we will live in conflict, leading to stress and breakdown or relationships both socially and career wise.

Going back to our child analogy, the other trait in a child’s questions that we must return to is persistence. How many times does a child ask a question – until it understands the answer? Now how many times do you ask a question and stop asking in case you look a fool before you understand the answer.

As Luke chpt 11 vv9 says “Ask and you shall receive.”

Do not feel the fear, ask, ask, ask and even ask again until you understand he who thinks you are a fool for doing so is the bigger fool who wishes not to be understood.