Self-improvement is a lifelong process. To become something significant and successful in your life, you also have to make yourself worthy of it. The journey of self-improvement might seem difficult to many, but is it really that challenging? The answer is – not at all. To work on your self-growth, you just need to bring about some positive changes in your life. You need to reduce your engagement with entertainment, stay away from negative influences and people. And in today’s article, we will learn about such things that are essential for our self-improvement.
1. Watch Podcasts
Many people might find reading books and articles boring, but podcasts are quite interesting. A lot of us have the habit of watching entertaining videos on our phones while eating. We should change this habit and start watching podcasts instead of entertaining videos. This way, we can utilize that time to learn and discover something new.
If you want to know about the best podcasting YouTube channels in India, you can read this article.
2. Mental Well-being
In today’s world, where news channels, newspapers, and social media mostly show us negative things, it has become even more essential for us to take care of our mental health. Maintaining our mental well-being is not very difficult.
You can take care of your mental health to a great extent by doing these things:
- Keeping yourself away from social media.
- Creating distance from negative people.
- Focusing less on negative things.
You can practice these things to take care of your mental health.
3. Embracing Failures
People generally don’t like to lose and feel quite bad upon experiencing defeat. However, our approach towards failures should change.
We should perceive failures as opportunities to learn because from every loss, we do learn something new, and using this knowledge, we can better prepare ourselves for the next time.
4. Habits Switching
This is a very powerful and effective method of self-improvement. The concept is quite simple: you just need to replace some of your current habits with habits that will help you progress. For instance:
- Many people have a habit of watching something on their phones while eating. You don’t need to completely stop this habit; you can simply replace it with watching podcasts, interviews, book summaries, or something similar.
- Some people enjoy listening to music while doing household chores or small tasks. Instead of this, you should listen to audiobooks or podcasts.
- Many of us might have a strong addiction to social media. If you do too, the best solution is to create new social media accounts and only follow accounts that provide posts aiding you in your self-improvement journey.
These are just a few examples. If you think about it, you’ll find many things that you can replace with positive habits.
5. Reading Habits
If you observe almost all successful people, regardless of their field, one common thing you will find is that they keep reading books and articles to enhance their own knowledge. That’s why, whatever we are interested in, we should read books and articles related to that thing.
“So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install a lovely bookshelf on the wall.”
Roald Dahl
6. Practice Mindfulness
Often, it happens that when we are talking to someone or being somewhere, we are not truly present. Our mind is somewhere else, and this is where the concept of mindfulness comes in, which means staying in the present moment.
Benefits of Mindfulness
- While conversing with someone, you can understand all their words and emotions.
- You can observe your surroundings and learn new things.
- By observing interactions with other people, you can learn how to behave and how not to.
- Due to mindfulness, you can grasp things quite well while listening to podcasts or audiobooks and reading books.
And there are many more benefits of mindfulness.
7. Listen Audiobooks and Podcasts
Many times, it happens that people listen to music while cooking, cleaning, or before sleeping. If you replace this time with listening to audiobooks or podcasts, you can’t even imagine how much new things you can learn. Learning through audiobooks and podcasts related to your interests is one of the best and easiest ways.
8. Set Goals and Plan Things
Many people have a habit of procrastinating their important tasks. The best way to avoid this is to set goals and plan to achieve those goals. For example, if there is a book of 100 pages:
- Goal: Finish reading this book in 5 days.
- Planning: Read 20 pages every day to accomplish this.
9. Exercise
Physical health is connected to our mental health, which is why exercise should be a daily part of our lives. You cannot truly understand its benefits until you try it yourself.
Getting a gym membership is a great option. But if for some reason you can’t go to the gym, you can replace it with a daily morning walk of at least 20 minutes.
Personally, I have experienced many benefits from exercising in the gym. Such as increased confidence and body size, and a reduction in anxiety and depression.
10. Practice Gratitude
Gratitude means expressing thankfulness or feeling happy for all the small or big things and relationships in your life.
You should express gratitude for the little things. Even the phone you’re using to read this article, for example. You should feel happy and fortunate about your family and love relationships, realizing how lucky you are to have these things and people in your life.
Practicing gratitude like this can greatly help you become a positive thinker, allowing you to appreciate the value of your possessions and relationships more fully.
11. Appreciate Challenges
Many people often start questioning why difficulties occur in their lives. However, successful individuals view challenges as opportunities to learn. They improve themselves by learning from these tough situations.
Maintaining a positive outlook during difficult times can indeed be a bit challenging, but you can do so by keeping your perspective somewhat positive.
12. Use Less Social Media
In today’s time, the shortest and simplest way to disturb mental peace is to just spend 10 minutes opening Instagram, Facebook, or any social media and scrolling through it. You will inevitably come across some negative things that will spoil your mood.
This problem becomes even bigger when people don’t realize that social media is slowly leading them towards sadness and anxiety.
Also Read – Stoic Rules: 8 Stoic Practices for Better Life
Personally, to avoid this, I have created two Instagram accounts:
- One account is for when life is going really well, and I need to spoil my mood.
- The second account is where I only follow accounts that share positive posts. By seeing the posts on this account, I feel motivated and positive.
In today’s time, you might not be able to completely stay away from social media, but you can definitely use it positively.
13. Creating Healthy Boundaries
I have seen many people who have no boundaries. They don’t set their own limits and don’t respect the boundaries of others.
Here, boundaries refer to what limitations you have for making jokes or enduring jokes, regarding your work and time in the office, and the boundaries you or your partner have set in your relationship that should not be crossed.
In the journey of self-improvement, you should learn to define your boundaries and also respect the boundaries of others.
14. Self-care
The meaning of self-care is not just about making yourself look good from the outside. Self-improvement and self-care are both closely interconnected.
True self-care means how much you care for yourself from within, and an estimate of this can be gauged by how much effort you put into your self-growth, whether you’re eating healthily, whether you’re doing something to keep yourself fit, whether you’re staying away from negative things and people, whether you’re focusing on your own learning.
In short, you should understand self-care and self-improvement like a bulb and electricity. Without both being present together, light cannot be produced.
15. Be Kind
Last but not least, ‘Kindness’. Among the most essential elements for living a life of joy and positivity, this is one. Always treat others with kindness. This is such an important matter that an entire article can be written about it.
There’s a wonderful quote – Treat others the way you want to be treated. Kindness is deeply connected to our self-improvement and positivity.
Must Read – Kuku FM: 20 Best Self-Improvement Audiobooks
In this challenging life, be the reason for someone’s smile.
Conclusion
Self-development or self-improvement should be a part of our life. We should not think that there is no need to learn after a certain age. The desire to learn should be kept alive throughout our lives.
In this article, everything that has been mentioned, I also apply all those things in my life. Therefore, I can confidently say that all these things are necessary to make your life better and successful.