Constant Personal Development

Constantly improving our skills is hard work, but the rewards are greater than the effort. Here’s why training is important, and how you can get the best from it

One of the things I learned from practicing martial arts was the concept of training in order to do things better. This seems like common sense—of course we train to do things better—but what can easily happen is that we keep doing the same training over and again, expecting to get better, when what we need is not just training, but constant improvement in our training.

In the martial arts—especially in karate—this is done by structuring the training into a formal system that teaches the basics and then ever more complicated moves until the student acquires competency. Sometimes the movements being taught don’t seem—to the student at least—to have anything to do with the other moves. But then the student learns a more complicated move and finds that one of the basic moves is needed to complete a more complicated sequence.

In Japanese, the moves are called kata, and mean literally “form”. It’s a way of keeping the student on his toes and ensuring he keeps moving forward. In some ways this relates to the concept of Kaizen—a concept used by Japanese companies (and now companies from many other countries) which teaches that small incremental improvements will eventually lead to a big improvement, or a market advantage.

Sounds good… But how can we use this in our self-development?

By understanding that this concept of constant improvement doesn’t only relate to martial arts or to company performance, that’s how.

It can be used on a personal level as a way of inspiring you to achieve greater things, as a tool to increase your motivation and to help in keeping your personal development on track. This can encompass improvements in anything from your social skills, your career, your finances and even your relationships.

Goal achievement

In the end, this boils down to goal achievement, and if we want to take goal achievement seriously, we have to embrace the concept of constant improvement. Even when no structured training program exists, this method can still work wonders. You just have to design your own training program or at least keep setting fresh goals in order to give you something to aim for. We are talking about self-development after all. :-)

The big question is: where to begin?

Getting started

Getting started on your training is the hardest part—and a big cause of this problem is that you simply don’t know where to start. Even if you know which area of your life you want to train—your finances, your relationships, whatever—it’s difficult to get started because of a paradox. You know what you want to train in, but you don’t know which areas within that subject you should concentrate on. So the end result is that you need to begin, but can’t because you don’t know where to. At this point you’re so incompetent you don’t know how incompetent you are.

The only way round this dilemma is to take the simple solution—advice I’ve found to be sound in many situations. Just start. Just jump right in and start to train. This can mean finding a class in whatever subject interests you, or buying a book on the subject, or maybe just reading an article on a website—much like you’re doing now. If you’re training your mind—by learning how to invest money wisely, for instance—this will give you some idea of what you don’t know… and what you do. If you’re training in some physical discipline, such as martial arts, you’ll find what you can do and what you can’t. This enables you to pinpoint your weaknesses and work on them. You might have good balance, but have a body which is not supple. So you’ll need to do a lot of stretching to get the body in shape. You might be supple, but lack physical strength, so strength-improving exercises will be the way to go.

It might be a case that you’re weak in all areas, but until you actually start the training, you just don’t know what it is that you don’t know.

For instance, about a year ago I made the decision to learn how to earn money online. At that time I hadn’t a clue about how to do business online and so didn’t have any strong areas at all. I knew how to use a computer, sure, but most of the terms used on the Internet were utterly foreign to me. I didn’t even know how many ways there were to earn money online—and believe me there are a lot.

But it was only after I started looking at the possibilities and began to learn a little bit—by buying a few ebooks, visiting forums and stuff—that I learned what it was I needed to know. I had to cut through a lot of garbage—and believe me there’s more garbage talked about earning money online than there are ways to earn money online—though until I’d experienced it I didn’t know how bad it actually was. Without it I couldn’t get to the real stuff. It showed me what I didn’t know but needed to in order to start moving forward.

First I decided that my main business model would be to build websites for advertising and affiliate income. Once I’d decided that—the first part of my training—I could work on tailoring my training program to suit me. Then I began to look around only for those opportunities which fitted well with the approach I’d chosen.

The first thing I did was join a forum where a lot of people who were already making money online discussed things. Through asking questions there I found a lot of good information, and that included the fact that you don’t need to be a computer whiz—a geek, if you like—to have an online business. Just a basic understanding is enough, especially in the beginning. Most of the stuff is a black box—you don’t need to know how it works… only that if you press a few buttons it does the job. Incidentally, this is one of the great benefits of just getting started with your training—you often find that you need to learn much less than you thought you did.

Within a few months I knew how to build a website from scratch, load it onto a server and get it live. I also knew the basics of growing links to my sites in order to promote them, plus various other methods of website promotion such as article marketing. I built a few sites and within a few months the first few dollars had started to come in.

Taking training further

Once my small network of sites was up and running and bringing in at least some income, I looked around for ways I could train further. One of them was to join a membership site that taught advanced techniques for getting the most out of your websites—and how to build more sites which would bring in more income. This meant more work, and the rewards won’t be seen for a few months, but I’m keeping in mind that the rewards will be worth it.

I also started this blog just a few weeks ago as an eventual alternative income stream to my network of smaller sites and a possible way of promoting some offline business ideas I have. (One of the things my constant training—and not only training as regards the web—has taught me is the importance of a diversified income) This blog is an absolute freshman on the scene, but it’s already seeing some traffic and is well-ranked in the search engines for some phrases. Maybe you got here by searching for one of them.

The notable thing is that until just a few weeks ago I didn’t know a thing about blogs, and the reason for the half-decent start is that in order to get the thing up and running as quickly as possible and in a way which ensures the promotion is done properly I paid for… you guessed it… training.

Really, you can’t beat training…

Still training

Although I know enough to move forward, I’m still learning. I still consider myself a beginner—and always will. There’s always something new to learn—another reason why constant training is important. I currently subscribe to two membership sites, both run by top notch people in the industry of online income. Every day I soak up some new knowledge which will help me expand my business or which shows further avenues for training. The next steps will be to hire some freelance staff to help me with my smaller sites, and to keep growing this blog. The fact that you’re reading this blog—you are reading it aren’t you?—shows I’m at least moving forward in that area…

Why constant training works

The reason that constant training works is that as you get better, your life gets easier. This has a tendency to increase your motivation, which leads to the desire to train more, which increases motivation….

chess setThe important point to remember is that you need to keep pushing yourself slightly beyond the boundaries of what you’re capable of. Doing stuff you can already do means your progress stops dead. If anything, it has a tendency to make you slip back, because you could lose motivation.

As you keep moving through your training program, you keep raising the bar, so that what was once extremely difficult becomes easier and easier as time goes on. In my martial arts classes I remember first doing the basic moves and feeling as though my feet were glued to the floor. But after a few months those basic moves had become second nature and I didn’t have to think about them at all. They’d become a subconscious habit. The movements hadn’t changed; only my ability to perform them had.

It’s the same with any area of your life. When I first began to look at earning a living online I was so incompetent in the area it was unreal. I read an interview with an expert about website building and web promotion and for all practical purposes didn’t understand a word of it. For the most part it was as though the guy was speaking in a foreign language. What is an RSS feed? What does pinging mean? And how do you do it? And does it do you any good? Help!

I can laugh now—well, shake my head at the craziness of it—but at the time I sort of held my head in my hands and the words just seemed to swim about on the page. I really was so incompetent I didn’t know how incompetent I was. Now I can hardly remember what it was like to NOT understand those terms. Now I can improve my understanding of the way the web works with less effort—which in turn means I can make my life in this area easier again…

Work on your weak points

The whole point of training is to do in private what will help you in public.

In order for you to do this, you need to work on your weak points. But before you work on your weak points, you need to know what they are, and the way to discover your weak points is to monitor your performance outside of the training. Your performance outside of training is not training—your performance is a way to see what needs to be improved.

The martial art I studied was one-of-a-kind, a mixture of traditional Japanese karate and western boxing. It trained several kick-boxing champions (though not me among them, I must admit), and the reason it was so successful was that the instructors changed the system if they thought it could be improved. Whenever a fight was lost, the reasons were analyzed and the training changed to incorporate new techniques. Then those who competed at championship level trained hard with the new techniques, making it much less likely that they would lose the next time. The new techniques might be used rarely, but when a situation arose that needed that technique—and the situation almost certainly would arise at some point—the training already had it covered.

It’s true that if you train hard you can fight easy. Or at least easier.

Training in one area makes
you better in other areas too

Training doesn’t help you only in the area you train in. It improves other areas of your life. For instance, as part of my martial arts training, I learned how to do stretching exercises. This makes the muscles supple, which makes movement easier in everything you do. Walking is easier, climbing stairs is easier, which means you get less tired—which means more energy in general.

Even if the training is in something intangible—such as improving your finances—it can still have beneficial effects, since the good feelings about your finances will seep into other areas of your life and make improvements there. If your finances are in better shape, you’ll probably feel better, which means you’ll do better in your job, which means more money, which means another improvement in your finances…

In the end, training is never wasted. I no longer practice that martial art because I now live a long way from the place where it’s taught and I’d have to spend over a day traveling to get there… But that training is still with me, in an appreciation of what can be achieved by training… and the fact that I still do those stretching exercises…

Getting better has its rewards

Training yourself in new skills will bring rewards—and often monetary rewards at that. The reason that people with expert knowledge can be paid so much is because they are paid for their knowledge and not their time. There’s an old story about a ships engineer who retires. The new engineer joins the crew and the ship sets sail. A few days at sea and the engines begin to make a terrible noise. Everyone spends days analyzing the engines but can’t find the problem. Eventually the old engineer is called out of retirement to see if he can help. He agrees, but says it will cost $10,000 to solve the problem. He comes on board ship and listens to the engines for a moment, then places a heavy kick to the control panel. The noise stops immediately. As he collects his $10,000, one of the crew says: “$10,000 for five minutes of your time is incredible.” And the old engineer replies: “I didn’t get paid $10,000 for five minutes of my time. I got paid $10,000 for knowing where to kick.”

Training certainly pays, and you should always remember that…

You are not alone

Well, OK, you are… but not quite. You have to decide which areas you want to train… and you have to actually decide to do the training… and you have to do most of the work. In the end, your progress depends entirely on you.

But the good news is that most things have already been worked out for you.

My math teacher maintained that there were no real mathematicians anymore, and had a favorite saying when the class thought the subject was becoming too difficult. “We’re not mathematicians,” he would say decisively. “The ancient Greeks worked all this out and wrote it down. All we do is copy them.”

Its advice I’ve always remembered, and in building my web skills, you could say that I’m doing that—though it’s less following the ancient Greeks and more following the modern geeks. :-)

What it boils down to is that whatever area of your life you want to improve there are books you can read, courses you can go on, people you can pay to help you attain the knowledge you need. Most of the heavy lifting has already been done. In some cases all you need to do is ask and people will give advice, sometimes for the best possible price—free.

Start now… Because we shall
never see this day again…

Getting started can be difficult, but once you start to do something it gets easier. You get into the habit, and it becomes difficult to stop. Once you begin, you find that it gets easier to keep going, especially when you start to see improvements and success—which you surely will. Bad habits are hard to break, but so are good habits. Make good habits of improving yourself and pretty soon you’ll find it difficult to not improve yourself.

How to get going

Choose an area of your life that you would like to improve—and then do something about it. Make a decision to work on that area for the next few months, or years if it’s a major area in need of major improvement.

Find people who know what they are doing, and get advice. Libraries are full of it. The internet is full of it. The main thing is to just get moving.

Once you’re moving you’ll see what it is you really need to do. You’ll know what it is you really lack. Then you can tailor the training to what you really need. But until you’re moving you can’t see where your weaknesses lie. Eventually you can move toward an area where the skill becomes part of your everyday life, something you can do with practically no effort. When you were a child and first began to learn to read, you probably struggled over a lot of the words. But after a while you became more fluent, until eventually reading just became second nature, enabling you to read without much effort at all, including words on a computer screen—a training program which, for instance, enabled you to read this article.

You’ve been through training before. Why not do it again?

And again…