Curious if there are any health benefits of personal development?
Indeed, there are. Not only that, but there are also major benefits to encouraging your workers to focus on goals to improve their character, skills, and capabilities.
Any company leadership hoping to have an enthusiastic and passionate team will want their workers to invest in personal development time. Not only is personal growth good for one’s mind, but it’s also good for overall health.
This post will dive into what personal development is, its health benefits, and ideas to bring more of it into the workplace.
What is Personal Development?
Personal development is any skill you want to learn and add to your skill set to improve your life. These vary from person to person, but there is one characteristic most people have when it comes to personal development: a growth mindset.
With this type of mindset, there’s no limit to the types of skills or improvement one can make in their life. In fact, there are multiple opportunities to pick areas to improve.
The seven areas of opportunity for personal development include:
- Personal growth
- Personal skills
- Personal power
- Personal analysis
- Personal objectives
- Personal improvement
- Personal empowerment
For those truly interested in the benefits of personal development, it’s often a lifelong process of assessing skills, setting goals, and learning better ways of doing certain things. Developing a personal development plan can help build the confidence to bring dreams to reality by ensuring the proper steps are taken to bring a specific vision to life.
What are the Health Benefits of Personal Development?
For those who wake up daily and simply go through the motions of life, it can get boring pretty quickly. While there’s something to be said for routine, a part of a fulfilling routine can include personal development. Creating an intentional personal development plan will allow you to see personal growth and, often, positive change in your life.
Plus, there are the health benefits of personal development to consider:
- Increases mental fitness - It’s not an easy task to look at how you can improve yourself. In fact, it takes an honest reflection to tackle ways you can be better. Personal development can help you set stronger boundaries and be open to more feedback, thus increasing your mental toughness.
- Healthier social connections and relationships - As you start looking at ways to improve yourself, you’ll also take a look at who you spend the most time with in your life. In doing so, you may discover better ways to communicate with loved ones and may also cut out toxic individuals who are negative and don’t have a growth mindset.
- Better physical health - The big-picture goal of personal development is to do a bit better each day. For many people, that includes creating (and sticking to) an exercise routine. Investing in daily exercise reduces the risk of health issues like obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and more.
- Improves habits - When you invest time into becoming better — no matter how big or small — these eventually become healthier habits. Whether it’s quitting nail biting, smoking, overeating, or negative thinking, a growth mindset is one aimed at overall healthier habits that will help you achieve fitness and wellness goals.
Each day, there is an opportunity for growth and improving health. Even if it’s just a small step, any opportunity seized to make your life better is healthy for both the mind and body.
How Personal Development Improves the Workplace
If you have a team of employees all focused on being their best, that includes their work production, too. Encouraging your employees to work on personal development, can also trigger a desire to focus on professional development as well. Doing so creates a team excited about doing their best work all the time.
Here’s a look at how encouraging personal growth helps your company:
- Advances skill sets - Personal development is all about learning more to do better. To do so, you end up learning new skill sets along the way. This can help employees with everything from better communication skills to more technical skills that they can use in the workplace.
- Increases productivity - By investing in personal growth and development, most people also pick up skills that help with time management and goal setting. This in turn helps workers to laser focus on work projects by prioritizing tasks to give them a way to get things done more efficiently.
- Builds confidence - Sometimes not knowing how to do a certain task or activity can hold individuals back from even trying. When investing in personal development, people learn skills that allow them to step outside their comfort zone and take risks. This can lead to better ideas in the workplace and workers feeling more confident in sharing more efficient ways of doing tasks.
- Improves the way your company handles change - One of the top reasons to encourage your team members to invest in personal development is that they will pick up valuable skills for the workplace. As they update and build on their skill sets, they can pitch in on bigger projects. They also can help your company handle changes more efficiently if more of your workers are expanding their skill sets.
Related: 5 Free Health and Wellness Classes For Wellness Champions to Try
Ideas for Personal Development at Work
At a loss for how to bring more personal development opportunities into the workplace? We’ve got you covered. It’s not as tricky as you may think.
Here are some examples of ways to bring personal development into the workplace:
- Share job postings internally first - Before opening up new jobs to the outside world, encourage your team to apply first. This will quickly show who is interested in leveling up and working on their skill sets to get into a new position.
- Help your team build their network - Consider hosting a community networking event at your workplace. This allows outsiders to learn more about what your company does. It also helps your team make stronger connections in the community which can further lead to new personal and professional development opportunities.
- Host valuable lunch and learn events - Take the time to plan out lunch and learn events that allow your employees to invest in growth time. This can be a workshop on time management, stress management techniques, productivity hacks, and more. Employers may also consider bringing in speakers like psychologists, yoga instructors, doctors, and other inspirational figures to speak to workers.
- Purchase tickets to special events - Keep an eye out for events that bring motivational speakers and professional and personal development events to your area. If you bring a large group, often you’ll get a discount from the organizers.
Remember, while you may offer all the free resources in the world, some workers may not be motivated at all to take you up on these opportunities. Self-improvement must come from a deep desire to change and improve and not everyone is excited about that. Invest in and reward the employees who are interested and they’ll feel inspired to continue their path to improve themselves.
How do you encourage your team members to invest time in personal and professional development? Share your thoughts below!
