5 Steps to Serious Personal Development to Dramatically Improve your Career.

As the dynamic Jim Rohn says, “formal education may lead you to a great career, but self-education and personal development will lead you to making a fortune”

For most this is never realised until its too late but I now clearly understand the reasons why few individuals do significantly better than others in the same work environment. In fact it’s glaringly obvious in my work place almost to the point of blinding.
Over 80% of sales people have never read a sales related book, let alone invested in any form of personal development or sales tools. Yet they, actually waste the most time being distracted by everything shiny that goes by, including social media notifications while at work. These are the same people that wonder why they’re mediocre at best, and where the months and year disappear to without much accomplishments or progress.

If you’re looking to make significant progress in your life, as Warren Buffet says “the best way is to invest in yourself through personal development” To put it another way, the best investment you can make is in yourself.

What is personal development? According to official definitions online, Personal development involves the conscious pursuit of personal growth by expanding your self-awareness, knowledge, and improving personal skills or talents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_development

Here are 5 musts for serious & sustainable personal development in your sales career;

1) Determine and prioritise your main objectives and Direction of Personal Development. You have to know yourself and what you want to accomplish.

First you have to realise or identify the problem. What do you spend most of your time doing before, during and after working hours? Understanding yourself and what you want to accomplish personally and professionally usually is the hardest step to improving. It’s necessary and can be the most worthwhile step to personal development.

Determine your strengths and weaknesses.
What are you best at and what areas require attention and improvement?
What is your value assessment?
Where do you fit within your organisation or the marketplace?
What steps are required to take control of your destiny or sales results?
Devise a plan to focus on the skills required to accomplish your personal development goals.

2) Set your realistic goals to personal development by creating a new pathway to learning; If you continue to do what you’ve always done then don’t expect different or better results.

Your learning pathway will be a new method of developing some rituals that will guide you through your personal development. You have to implement a “new way”

Determine what you want to accomplish in your sales career, is it more sales, more income, and the ability to increase productivity without putting in massive long days, is it more family time, confidence or passion, or is it more self-discipline to tune out all the noise around you?
Research and invest in sales tools immediately. This could include good personal development books, sales books or audio books, workshops or training programs.
Source out content online. There are unlimited seminars and motivational videos on platforms like YouTube and free downloads or subscriptions from sites like www.salesforce.com or www.success.com
Ensure your new learning pathway assist you with choosing and creating new tools and skills to move your performance towards the results you seek.

3)Take Action, to get better every day; Doing research and choosing your resources in step two is great, but knowledge about a new discipline does not make one proficient in that discipline. Once your new learning pathway is established, practicing, using, and repetition of those skills is imperative to make a part of one’s daily rituals because this will ultimately lead to improved performance results. Rituals are where the results are found, so be prepared to implement and practice them daily using your new founds tools and skills.

Instead of watching TV, substitute some of that time with listening to podcasts and watching seminars or videos relevant to enhancing your pathway.
Use your time more efficiently by mastering the use of, “NET” time, No Extra Time. This could be while on a bus or train, in the gym, or driving yourself anywhere to substitute listening to music or news for example with motivational or educational audio content.
Read all the books and material you can read relevant to your pathway to educate and prepare yourself.
Make this a ritual every day to invest in your personal growth and development to be a better version of yourself every day.
Focus your personal development plan on mastering your strengths and improving on your weaknesses to be able to achieve massive levels of success in the areas most important to you.

4) Evaluate Your Results; Now that you’ve Determined and Prioritised your Objectives, Step 1, Set Goals to a New Pathway, Step 2, and Taken Action, Step 3, we must take a look a measuring progress and results. Remember daily progress is what pulls you towards your ultimate goals. It’s those bite size steps of daily progress that leads to massive success in the future. Contrary to ignoring the little things like I have in the past that could lead to some big failures;

Set systematic timelines to constantly reassess your goals. This lets you know whether your personal development plan is on track or if tweaks and modifications are required.
Learn to identify situations that lead to success as well as situations that proved more challenging and how to better handle or avoid in the future.
Get out of your comfort zone. Use communicating with peers and managers as an outside or independent evaluation method to keep you focussed.
Apply appropriate actions to the projects or goals being pursued for maximum results. Not every tool applies to every situation.

5) Maintaining Your New found Direction; Now that your personal development and growth plan is all laid out, this is one of the biggest life steps most successful people take. The decision to engage in personal development can be easy but it’s practicing those daily rituals that can be difficult as we’re all creatures of habit. Follow these steps;

Follow all steps 1-4 and get out of your comfort zone. As Joel Osteen said, “sometimes you have to push yourself to a point of uncomfortableness.”
Remember that personal development is an ongoing process and your journey has just begun.
Include nutrition and fitness as part of your personal development. Its one thing to know it all, but all the knowledge in the world won’t do much for you if you’re in poor help. As Jim Rohn says, “an apple a day, a walk around the block”. To simplify, diet and exercise is a must in your personal development repertoire.

When all said the objective of personal development is to develop your philosophy, work on your attitude, and engage in the activities to generate the results you desire. When all this to come’s together you can increase you value in many ways;

Become more valuable to your organisation.
Become more valuable to the marketplace thus creating more opportunities for advancement.
Become more valuable to yourself and your family by having more quality time available.
Do not give up on your personal development until you’ve learned, changed and grown into the person you want to become.

Congratulations! Your personal growth and development journey has just begun. It’s a vital step to achieving sales mastery and to life in general.
For much more on maximising your sales potential, follow my Sales Mastery Blog series @ https://www.thereidmethod.com/blog/

EVEROLD REID is a Lease Renewal Advisor at Lexus of Oakville with over 26 years’ experience working in retail automotive industry, advertising and real estate marketing initiatives across North America. Throughout
his career, he developed a set of proven best practices that propelled him to become a consistent top performer in fast-changing and competitive markets.