Personal Development Phase II

Personal Development is the critical phase that is the cornerstone of the entire foundation to building the structure that will lead us to Kingdom Success in our life! It is the un-assuming core of our being that is tremendously neglected, which leads us to a minimal portion of our potential that is rarely realized by individuals in our society on a wide scale!

Our educational system focuses on areas of study such as mathematics, language arts, economics, science etc. The system often neglects to provide extensive concentration on our mental mindset, and addressing imperative responsibilities that we encounter throughout our lives. Many of us struggle to understand the importance of time management, and how to live a balanced and prioritized life, etc. catering to the essentials that provide the platform on which the other areas of study should build off of!

From mindset, to vision, leadership, habits, time management and beyond, personal development is significantly important in the foundational building of Kingdom Success; as it is the heart that pumps the actions that we make in every other aspect of our lives.

Take television watching for example, according to a statistics study done by the Nielsen Company, the average person watches approx. 6.5 hours of TV per day! And that’s just the average, which leads to the conclusion that some people watch even more than that! So in the calculation of the average lifetime, that means that we’ll spend +/- eleven years of our lives just watching television! That number also includes the commercials, which equal three years of time by themselves!!! This is an example in personal development, of our time management, habits, and priorities that we subconsciously designate to each day of our lives, depriving us of productivity that could go towards exponentially growing our net-worth, or learning a second language, giving back to the community, etc.

In the book, “The Power of Focus,” Jack Canfield remembers his time with W. Clement Stone that went like this:

When I went to work for W. Clement Stone in 1969, he sat me down for a one-hour interview. His first question was, “Do you watch television?” He then asked me, “How many hours a day do you think you watch?’ After a short calculation I answered, “About three hours a day.”

Mr. Stone looked me directly in the eye and said, “I want you to cut out one hour a day; reduce your TV watching time down to two hours per day. If you do that, you’ll be saving 365 hours per year. If you divide that by a forty-hour work week, you’ll see that you’ll have added about nine and a half additional weeks of productivity to your life. That’s like getting two additional months per year!”

I agreed that this was a great leveraging concept, and then I asked Mr. Stone what he thought I should do with this extra hour every day. He suggested I read books in my field of motivation, psychology, education, training and self-esteem. He also suggested that I listen to educational and motivational cassettes, take classes and study a foreign language.

You see, this is something that is very simple, but can make a world of difference when it comes to the big picture which is our lives as we know it! Change doesn’t happen overnight, but it is the consistent action of mundane tasks that create the extraordinary results that we seek to accomplish!