CHAPTER 23
Real education is igniting what’s inside you
I believe you need to grow there mentally before you go there physically. You need to acquire the success mindset first before you can achieve your goals in reality. To achieve all that you are capable of achieving, you need to gain the level of belief, skill and knowledge that is required to obtain and maintain that success. In other words, you need to grow mentally into the person you need to be to achieve the goal you desire. It is the process of developing the belief, skill and knowledge needed that creates a mindset that turns your potential into a world of possibilities that will sometimes take you to places beyond your wildest imagination. When you are mentally prepared you start to change your physical state, how you walk, talk and present yourself to others, which in turn starts the manifestation of those goals that are most important to you. To put it another way, prior planning prevents poor performance. So what do you need to do to become the living example of the person who is achieving all that you are capable of? In the previous chapter you identified what you need to stop doing, start doing, do less of and do more of in your life. Now let’s look at how you can move to the next level. Below are the eight areas you can focus on to personally and professionally develop yourself … Over the next couple of chapters we’ll look at some of the options you have for your own personal development. Tom Peters famously said … ‘if you don’t add something to your resume every year you are obsolete.’ He was not talking about changing jobs or careers, but about the act of continuously adding and refreshing your skills and knowledge to keep ahead of the career curve or life curve, the ability to change before you need to or are made to change, to keep growing and evolving as you go through life. You and I cannot afford to stop learning, yet most people stopped learning when they left school or university. They had completed that learning process, which they saw simply as a means of acquiring a certain status, job or title. Or they just survived the ordeal of higher or tertiary education. The people who achieve the most are the people who become lifelong learners. They learn because they want to, not because they have to. They see the benefit and connection in learning both personally and professionally. Learning to live a better life and to become better as a person is as important as living itself. The key to learning is to put yourself in inspiring learning environments on a regular basis. These could be courses, programs, workshops or seminars that relate to your career development or your hobbies, interests or a particular skill or area in your life you want to work on, or just think would be fun to do. For myself, I want to place myself as a student in a learning environment every quarter. The best place to start is to define what you want to learn, then decide what is the best way to learn that skill or gain that knowledge, and then design a plan of action that best suits your needs and circumstances. There are so many learning options these days, from courses of different lengths to online webinars or face-to-face programs to following blog posts. Over the past couple of years I have put myself in all types of learning environments, from photography retreats to presentation skills programs to creativity conferences, and the amazing aspect is that I have always walked away with new knowledge or a new skill that has assisted me in another part of my life not directly related to this learning experience. These chapters are about what you can do to exercise your brain. Scientific research tells us that physical exercise and learning increases the neurogenesis of our brain — in other words, as we learn and exercise we create new neurons. As we all know, if we are active mentally and physically we live longer and lead more productive lives. So what are you doing to build up your mental muscle this year? No-one wants to get old before their time, and no one wants to lose their capacity to think better. Just as your car needs a service from time to time, your brain needs a maintenance plan. In the next couple of chapters we will explore a number of other ways for you to learn, create, design, investigate or experience what is going to strengthen your mental muscle this year and in the years ahead.
Learning