The ULTIMATE Personal Development CHECKLIST || How to Grow Yourself!!

A checklist to growing yourself, (or just starting personal development in general!)

I remember when I first started personal development, almost two years ago!

It all started out with watching videos on personal development and productivity where I found something so interesting about growing myself, and developing habits that would eventually change my life.

Then before I knew it, it became a passion for me to write about personal development and productivity and to share it with others!

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking…. I’ve just been thinking about the things I wish I knew when I was starting this whole personal development journey.

I’ll be honest, it was a bit tricky!

Because really, personal development is a unique journey for everyone. Everyone learns about personal development in different ways, and how they apply it is completely up to the circumstances that they face in their life.

I eventually did think of something, but it felt that it was more specific for me, rather than in a general sense.

But of course, my ideas come when I am doing something other than writing for a blog, and I thought of something that I would have definitely benefited from if I had it at the beginning.

A checklist! A personal development checklist. A list of habits that had helped me most with my personal development.

In the beginning, I definitely spent a lot of time trying out different habits that didn’t end up working for me. But these particular habits on the checklist were the habits that had helped me the most, and I really wished I did them at the start!

Now, I will present with you the 9 things on this personal development checklist. I made this list as generalised as possible, because at the end of the day, everyone has different situations and circumstances in their own lives.

Also, each thing on the checklist contains a mini action step that you can do to get it going!!

CHECKLIST:

Here are the key things to include in your personal development checklist:

1. Gratitude

This may be something that you have heard a million times before, and that is okay. I heard it many times as well pre-(taking personal development seriously), and it was something that I felt was so repetitive.

But honestly, it’s nothing new. Having gratitude is not overrated anymore, and in fact it’s one of the first steps to enhancing our mindset!

Yes, having gratitude does mean being grateful for the amazing things that are happening, or had happened in your life. You may accomplish some of your goals, and you’re grateful. The waiter that served your food in a restaurant, you’re grateful to them… there are so many ways to be grateful.

You’re also grateful during the bad times

But what about the “bad” things? What about the little instances where things didn’t go your way? What about the things that went wrong? – Guess what, you’re also grateful as well.

Wait what do you mean? You may ask.

Honestly, from personal experience, when things go wrong and bad, that’s when you need gratitude more than ever. You need gratitude to help you see the brighter side of things, and give you an open perspective on what you can do next. For example, unpleasant situations arises with your finances, you can use gratitude to remember, “I’m grateful that I still have my family”, “I’m grateful that I am still breathing”. Even though those things you’re grateful for in those moments, probably are not even closely related to the situation you’re going through, you remember the blessings that you have in your life.

Gratitude while you’re working towards something that you’re not going to accomplish right away.

Also, having gratitude is also helpful when you’re working towards something where the results you’ll achieve are a long way away. This is where you’re being grateful for the things that you have while waiting for the things that you don’t have. For example, you’re working on your side hustle that you want to turn into a business, so that you can step away from your 9 to 5. Even though it’s going to take a bit of time to achieve that, you are still grateful that you even have a job, because not many people have the privilege to do so.

Remember that you GET to, not HAVE to

Continuing on from what I had mentioned, not everyone has the privilege to have the things that you may already have. That’s why a mindset shift to “GET to” rather than “HAVE to” can be a huge game changer.

There may be days when you HAVE to go to work, or you HAVE to exercise… but remember that not everyone has the opportunity to go to work, and even exercise. When you remember that you GET to do those things, in turn, you’ll grow your gratitude mindset knowing that you have more than you think.

Action STEP: So for this action step with this checklist, just list 3 things you’re grateful for first thing in the morning. Then, 3 things you’re grateful for before you go to bed. It may seem insignificant in the moment, or even for a few weeks, but check out how much of a difference it makes to your mindset in the long term.

2. Better Than Yesterday – 1% Better

This is all about getting better every day, even if it’s just a little bit.

Implementing this does two things:

Helps you remember that big accomplishments is actually through small steps consistently, rather than one-off big action.

I know that before, I used to think that success came from an “overnight action” and “big action”. Really, behind the scenes of every so-called overnight success you see, was all the work that had been done, that were done in much smaller steps than we think.

Getting 1% better every day also reminds us that “becoming the best version of ourselves” isn’t going to happen overnight. Just like how in less than 24 hours, we’re not going to get the body transformation, in less than 24 hours, we’re not going to all of a sudden become a good communicator when we’re shy, a productive worker when we have a history of procrastinating, a successful business owner when we haven’t even started yet.

How do we get a body transformation that we desired? It’s a series of smalls steps from building a healthy diet, implementing an exercise routine, and then doing other series of habits that we maintain over a period of time. Remember when I said period of time… it means that it’s going to take time, longer than 24 hours.

We focus on progression instead of perfection

This 1% better every day mindset also helps us shift our mindset from wanting everything to be perfect, to just focusing on progression.

Because when you think about it, putting off things because we want everything to be perfect first isn’t going to move us any forward, and in fact, we’re going to be staying in the same place.

However, when you focus on taking action, making some mistakes here and then, but getting better & progressing, you’re going to be moving forward. Even if it’s just the tiniest steps that get you forward, it’s better than going backwards or even staying in the same place.

Action Step: At the end of the night, just think of one thing, that you’ll do better tomorrow than you’ll do today. The more days in a row you do these 1% improvements, the faster you’ll see your growth and improvement.

3. Healthy Content Consumption

This is about about the content that you consume – everything that you read, listen to, watch, even the people that you surround yourself with.

As we had mentioned before, our mindset is a huge game changer to the way that we approach our life, and what develops our mindset comes from the things that we consume.

Our diet isn’t just the food that we eat you know, it’s everything that our mind is exposed to.

I’ve mentioned this in the blog post that had just been linked in the previous sentence, but someone in their right mind would not eat a poisonous food. However, it seems like we’re always letting poison into our mind, which eventually influences our thoughts, that leads to the actions and decisions that we make.

That’s why as much as it’s important to take care of our body, we also need to take care of our mind. There is truth into that saying “You can have a healthy body, but you can’t expect a positive life if you’re mind is negative.” Just like how the more junk food we put in our body, we become unhealthy, it’s the same with our mind (the more junk we expose our mind to, the unhealthier our mind becomes)

I’m not saying to stay away from occasional TV shows, or social media, instead just become more self-aware with what you’re consuming and know your limits. Just like how you want that junk food every one in a while, it’s the same with the content we consume. With junk food, we become self-aware when we eat it and know our limits. It’s the same with the content. We can watch TV and go on social media, and even consume news every now and then, but just know when to stop.

Personally for me, I don’t listen to any music until I’ve completed my podcast list. My podcast list has on average 5 podcasts a day, where it ranges from my church’s podcasts, business podcasts, mental health podcasts, and overall just educational podcasts that will help me learn something. That may be something you might want to think about as well?

Action Step: Have a podcast list. Have at least 3 minimum podcasts to listen to before listening to music or watching TV shows. Think of this as a meal plan – you don’t have the dessert and/or junk food until you eat all the healthier foods first!

4. Hobbies

I am aware that there are some who may say that having hobbies are a waste of time. I do agree in some sort. They are a waste of time… if you’re not intentional with them.

When you’re intentional with the hobbies that you start to regularly do, they actually don’t become a waste of time. Instead, they end up helping you in all your other important areas of your life, and are not really a waste after all.

Think about hobbies as things to do outside your regular life. Whether you’re studying, working, or both, and doing other commitments regularly, that’s your regular life. You want to do other things that will help you mix things up a bit, and not get bored doing the same regular things over and over again. Personally for me, the more bored I get at something that I have to do, the more I start to resent it. It makes sense that for most of us, we don’t want to resent something that is really important.

Now, you may say that you love your job, or you love what you’re studying. Maybe you have your own business right now and you love it, so you may say that you don’t need to do any other hobbies. BUT think about this (yes, it’s an analogy alert):

Imagine that the only food that you can eat, is your absolute favourite food in the whole world. That’s the only food that you can eat for the rest of your life. However, when you’re only eating that one food (for breakfast, lunch, and dinner), what do you think is going to happen? You’re going to get sick of that food. You’re going to get sick of eating it. And also, you’re going to start to resent eating that food, because it’s the only food that you can eat.

That’s why instead of eating that same food for the rest of our lives, we want to eat other foods as well outside of our favourite ones. We all have a favourite meal that we LOVE to eat, however we still want to mix things up with the food that we eat every once in a while.

It’s the same exact thing with hobbies. We may love our jobs or whatever we’re working on at the moment, but imagine five years, three years, or even one year down the track when that is all you do in your life. Just like with eating our favourite food over and over again, we’re going to get sick of it… we want to mix things up a bit!

I have written a whole blog post about this particular topic that you can read to know more about this. I highly recommend you read this blog post to understand more of this, because I genuinely believe that it’s so important!

You’ll understand more broadly how the hobbies that you do, eventually allows you to develop skills that are transferrable to all other areas of your life. For example, if you have a hobby that allows you to be creative, you may develop problem-solving skills through going through mini challenges where you have to improvise a few things to fix something. Problem solving skills are useful for ALL areas of your life. Another example, if you have a hobby that allows you to meet people, you’ll develop people skills overtime, which is for most jobs and even in business, is an ESSENTIAL skill to have!

That’s why when we look at hobbies from this perspective, they are not a waste of time after all.

Action Step: List 5 activities that you can do regularly that will:

• grow your mindset
• grow your knowledge
• keep you fit
• gets you creative
• makes you money (eventually)

5. Breaking Bad Habits

When you think about it, when it comes to starting any goal, the first thing we need to do is break some habits.

For example, starting a goal to lose weight starts with breaking bad eating habits.

Starting a goal to have a side hustle, starts with breaking some bad procrastination habits.

Starting a goal to have better grades, starts with breaking bad study habits.

We actually don’t like the habit

Here’s what I mean by this –

When we have a bad habit, we don’t actually like doing the bad habit itself, that why we want to break it right?

Instead, we actually like the feeling that we get from doing that bad habit.

For example, for some (especially for me), I don’t really like brushing my teeth BUT I like the feeling I get from brushing my teeth, including a fresh mouth and fresh breath.

Think of a habit that you have, and the feeling you get from it. You’ll realise how you don’t actually like the habit, you only like the feeling.

That’s one of the reasons why habits are so hard to break. When we try to break a habit, we just try to stop doing it altogether. However, when we stop the habit altogether, we start to crave the feeling that we get from that habit. What ends up happening? We fall back into those bad habits.

Replace over eliminate

That’s why one of the key ways to actually breaking a habit, and keeping it that way is replacing the habit.

Lets say that brushing your teeth was a “bad habit”. If we tried to eliminate the habit of brushing our teeth altogether, we will start to crave the feeling of fresh breath and a fresh mouth. Then what ends up happening is that we fall back into the old “bad” brushing your teeth habit.

However, if we replaced that “bad” habit with another healthier habit (please remember I’m just being hypothetical here with my analogies!) such as chewing gum instead, we end up still getting that feeling of having a fresh mouth. Then it becomes easier to stay away from that bad habit.

As you can see, the key to breaking bad habits is not about eliminating it all together, but replacing it to give us that same feeling that we get from that previous one.

Action Step: List the bad habits that you have, reflect on the feeling that you get from it that you crave, and then think of a replacement habit that will still give you that same feeling.

6. Developing Good Habits

Ironically, while bad habits are hard to break, good habits are hard to keep.

To sum it all up briefly, it’s all because of instant gratification and that is when we want something, and we want it now.

We’re hungry? – We don’t need to spend an hour cooking a meal, or even go through the Drive Thru at McDonalds to get food, we have food delivery services such as Uber Eats that can just have food delivered to our door.

We’re bored and we want to watch a TV show or movie? – Why wait until the show starts on cable, or even drive to the movies when we can just watch anything at anytime through Netflix or YouTube?

We want to buy something? – Why do we need to go to an actual store when we can just go online, put something in the cart, and get it delivered without us actually leaving the house.

Instant gratification is everywhere, and it’s one of the most significant reasons why we sometimes have a hard time keeping good habits.

We spend a day just eating healthy meals, and we automatically expect to see results right away. When we don’t see them, we let them go.

We spend 7 days going to the gym, and we don’t get the abs we want. When we don’t see them, we let them go.

We launch our side business and one month in, no results, we let it go.

That’s the pattern we may usually see when it comes to building good habits. It’s because we expect to see results/transformations right away.

That’s why the way to beat instant gratification is to simply think of the future (and we can apply this to bad habits too!).

Tempted to give into eating a whole bag of chips? Think of what would happen if you eat that whole bag of chips every day.

One day of eating those bags of chips won’t make us gain weight, but over a long period of time it would.

What about being tempted to break the good eating habits? Think of what would happen if we kept those eating habits every day.

One day of healthy eating wouldn’t do miracle works to our body overnight, but over a long period of time it would.

It’s all about having patience with the progression of our habits. Our mindset needs to switch from expecting results right away, to acknowledging that good things take time.

Action Step: Think of habits that you want to build, and every time you feel like giving them up, think of the future. Think of the body you could have if you kept up those eating and exercise habits. Think of the success your business could have if you don’t give up.

You can also use this trick for your bad habits too! Every time you feel like giving into your bad habits, think of the future. Think of what would happen to your health if you keep eating McDonalds. Think what would happen to your mindset if you keep scrolling social media.

7. Reading

I know that you must be thinking… I’ve heard of this one before!

I’m not going to expand on my list of a thousand of reasons why you should start reading, so I’ll just give you one important reason:

It grows your mindset!

I love podcasts and audiobooks as well, but the experience you get from reading an actual book hits so much more differently.

Like with podcasts and audiobooks, you just hear a person talking… they’re talking to you, or in fact to a general audience.

However, when you’re reading a book, you actually feel like every line you read is directed towards you.

It’s like every line you read is meant for you, and that’s not the kind of similar experience you get from listening to a podcast or audiobook.

So if you want to start reading, start reading books related to your situation! My blog post are based on the books that I read. Even if a blog post is not on specifically one book, it’s a combination of a whole bunch of other books that I have read.

So definitely give it a try!

Action Step: Buy your first book, and start reading it… even if it’s just 2 lines a day! Yes, only 2 lines. The key here is building the habit. Just like how you say to yourself that you’ll only be on social media for 5 minutes, and it turns into an hour, it’s the same with reading. Read just 2 lines.. that’s it, the more reading you do that’s a bonus!

8. Have Boundaries

While we may think of self-care as as face masks, fancy lattes, or elegant spa days, self-care is also having boundaries as well.

Boundaries are about taking ownership of our lives.

Has there ever been times when you said yes to going somewhere even though you’d rather stay home? Or even said yes to going somewhere even though you have something more important to do?

Have you ever said yes to doing something even though you know deep down you are too busy and overwhelmed?

I could list plenty of examples. The whole idea is that self-care is not just the regular activities that we do to recharge ourselves, it’s also the lifestyle that we live to take ownership of our time.

In this blog post, we listed four forms of ways that we can use boundaries as a form of self-care, and they include:

• Turning off notifications during our me-time.
• Saying no.
• Limiting consumption of social media & news.
• Listening to our bodies.

Knowing your boundaries, and following through on them is key to personal development because it tells yourself that you’re putting yourself first.

Action Step: Brainstorm boundaries that you will implement in your life and start following through on them!

9. Have Goals

Goals give us a very effective thing – it gives us direction and helps us feel like we have a purpose.

Imagine how you want your life to be. Imagine what you want to accomplish in your life.

Imagine waking up in the morning and doing something that you absolutely love. What’s the first thing you think of?

Now, these goals can go from small goals to big goals, but here’s why we should consider working towards a big goal.

If the goal is too easy, it may get too boring. While having a big goal is harder, the process towards getting to your goals and accomplishing it is what is going to build you as a person and it’s where you’re going to learn your greatest lessons.

Imagine living life without having any goals to work towards… feels weird to imagine right? That’s because in life, we always want to be working towards something. The question is, what do we want?

Here is how you can do this:

Think of one area of your life that you want to work on right now. Whether that’d be your work, health, your relationships… whatever it may be. You can even go outside the box and think of new things you want to work on such as a business.

Then, let that be your main area of focus, “your goal” for the next few months. Let that be something that you’re going to work towards.

Now that you have the specific big goal that will give you direction, focus on the systems that will get you that goal. That system are the processes and the steps that will get you to your goal.

It may sound like it’s going to give us a big headache, and that’s fine… even if it’s just small steps, that is better than staying in the same place!

Once you figured our your steps and the systems you will do to undertake, then you can proceed to focusing on your systems. Every once in a while, see if that system brings you closer to your goals or not, either way revise it so you can always continue to improve and grow.

Action Step: Just have only ONE big goal that you will work towards. Then develop the systems to go and achieve it (even if it’s just little steps!!)

BE KIND TO YOURSELF no matter what!

I just want you all to remember that while there are some things on this list that may or may not be new for you, it is all okay!

Everyone grew up differently, and came from different mindsets (meaning that the things we were exposed to that formulated our mindset are different). If there is something on here that is completely different, that is all good!

I am a huge fan of taking small steps, because I am a big believer in how small steps done consistently eventually make a big difference. Even if one thing on this list is implemented, that is 100% fine because taking one small step is better than taking no steps at all!

Anyways, I really hope that this list gave you a little starting point. Even if you just implement half a step (if that is even possible!), that is completely fine… I’m all for taking one step at a time!

– Lauren 🙂

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