Transformational Leadership. Social Entrepreneurship

Every Wednesday, we will feature a four or five-part series on personal development and/or leadership. This is the fifth and final installment of the Ignite Yourself series.

A personal development plan does not need to be too complicated. The main purpose of your personal development plan is to guide you in achieving your personal vision and ambition. It doesn’t hurt to be too ambitious but you also need to be realistic. Here are five tips to consider when you are writing your personal development plan.

1. Keep your personal vision in mind.

If you were a tree, then your vision would be your roots. Any plan for yourself should be rooted in your vision. Otherwise, you will end up toiling for all the wrong reasons and all the wrong directions. Better start with your vision now than regret your directions later in life.

2. Consider your present situation and your potentials.

Don’t just brag about your potential, you need to consider where you are now. You might be in a difficult situation, you might be in poverty right now or you might feel like a complete loser. But if you consider your potentials, your life may be infused with new energy and you can pursue your passion and live a meaningful life! Potentials give us hope. And hope gives us power to try and attempt great things. You may fail in the process but the hope is still there.

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Every Wednesday, we will feature a four or five-part series on personal development and/or leadership. This is the fourth installment of the Ignite Yourself series.

Before you can plan effectively, you need to take a look at yourself and answer several questions so that you can understand your present situation and make important changes. If you set out blindly and try to achieve your vision without understanding your situation, you may have to go back to the starting line several times to get things right. You’ll just waste your time. So better start by checking up on yourself.

Corporations and organizations have regular monitoring and evaluation sessions. They use a variety of methods for looking at their present positions and understanding their situation. They conduct environmental scanning and internal analyses tools. They engage in SWOT Analysis together with other tools for organizational development. SWOT analysis takes a look at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the organization. This tool can also be applied to an individual and it will also greatly help in giving momentum to a vision.

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Every Wednesday, we will feature a four or five-part series on personal development and/or leadership. This is the third installment of the Ignite Yourself series.

As you ignite yourself and pursue your passion, you need to define what your personal vision is. When you do, you can learn what you truly want in life and you can start planning for your life. If you define your vision excellently, you can benefit in several ways.

You know where you are going. It’s like getting access to a treasure map. Or at having a GPS navigator in your car. With a vision, you have a concrete sense of direction. You’re not just out on a road trip where you just drive till you arrive wherever. It might be a little cliché already but if your destination is nowhere, you’ll arrive there really fast!

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Every Wednesday, we will feature a four or five-part series on personal development and/or leadership. This is the second installment of the Ignite Yourself series.

Please keep away matches and lighters in the room. I’m not talking about suicide or arson. This is about something red. Something hot. Something terribly hot! Fire!

You need to set yourself on fire. You have to do it if you really want to pursue what you want in life and be all that you can be!

Fire has been used as the metaphor for burning passion. And why not? When you are passionate about something, you feel the fire of determination in your guts, you feel your heart beating for what you desire! Have you ever had that intense feeling in your heart when you realize that you truly love something? When you feel as if you’d die if you don’t achieve that?

Too often, however, we are content with where we are, we say that we want the best, we say that we do not want to be mediocre and we say that we will be successful! But the thing is, we are not doing anything.

Do you lack passion? If so you lack fire! You lack a life well lived!

You should set yourself on fire and be passionate!

Pause for a minute and ask yourself what you are passionate about. It might help if you closed your eyes. Go back to your past. Feel your heart beating. Be at one with your spirit and push away all distractions.

What are the things you truly enjoyed doing as a child, as a teenager, as an employee or as an adult.

When do you feel truly alive?

The Root Cause of Mediocrity

A lot of people feel that they are not living the life they’re supposed to live. They just go on through life with half-hearted fervor for what they’re doing. They go to the office and as soon as they sit down on their cubicles, they cannot wait for dismissal time. Probably, they become excellent once or twice but they never really live out a lifestyle of excellence. So where is their happiness?

Mediocrity at work and in one’s life is not caused by a lack of skills or lack of opportunities. It’s a case of not finding one’s purpose in life. When you lack purpose, you lack passion!

Let’s explore further how this lack of purpose manifests in life. If you recognize some of the symptoms describe below, then you might not have found your purpose yet and you are languishing in a sea of mediocrity and uncertainty.

1. You wake up in the morning with a vague sense of discontent and anxiety.

It begins in the morning. Instead of waking up to a bright new day, you feel that you want to prolong your time in bed because you feel there are just too many anxieties and worries during your waking time. If you can help it, you’d just stay in bed and at home all day. And this doesn’t happen on a weekend. It goes on day after friggin’ day after freakin’ day.

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Every Wednesday, we will feature a four or five-part series on personal development and/or leadership.

By the time I turned 25, I started asking myself about my directions and the things I want to get out of life. It was an interesting conversation with myself. I also involved the people I care about and who care for me, too.

More than just the destination though, I realize that I am on a journey! It’s a journey toward personal development. Just like you I wonder about the meaning of my life. I want to discover my directions, how to change for the better and how I can help make the world a better place.

I believe that there is so much more to life than simply going through the motions of working, going home, resting, and then working again the next day.

Life is very short. I mean, we only got around 70 years to live out our lives. Sometimes, you get to live till a hundred. But if you ask me, I’d rather live 50 fulfilling and well-lived years than living a frustrating, half-fulfilling and unremarkable 100 years. Our lives are simply much more meaningful than sitting on our chairs—at home or in a cubicle in an office and waiting for the grave.

By the time of this writing, I’m a twenty seven year-old young man who still has much to learn, much to accomplish and much to discover. Time flies by so fast. But what have I got to show for the years I’ve lived through? We cannot rely on destiny to give us what we want in life.

Yeah, you can be lucky. Perhaps, one day while walking on the streets, you pick up a bag full of several thousand dollars. Or you keep on betting on the lottery. If you have the looks and the personality, you might just meet an extremely gorgeous and rich man or woman, get married and be filthy rich! Or you might just wake up one day and find out you are the child of a king who just died and left you all his fortunes!

Fat luck! These events may happen. You’re an extremely lucky person if any of these ‘accidents’ happen. But if you’re like me, then you know that you have to rely on your guts, on your skills, and on your hands and feet to achieve your dreams and make things happen. There’s such a thing as an occasional “free lunch.” Yet our lives (and our taste buds) would be extremely boring if all we ever do is rely on free lunch.

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