Should I read this article? Yes if you love to know the practical ways to improve yourself. If you love to see growth in your life’s concerns, then you have to sit tight and consider the things written in this article.

Growth is part of our daily existence. Humans, plants, organizations grow when they receive the right attention. Growth can be attributed to increase in state, size, position,  ability, capacity to do things. Growth often times is the result of self or personal improvement.

Self improvement is any practice or action one takes to enhance one’s life, more importantly career, education, relationships, health, happiness, productivity, spirituality, and other personal goals.

You must keep in mind as you read this article and everyday of your that there is no end to enhancing and improving yourself. It is a journey that you must continue irrespective of the feats or milestones achieved.

You must consciously and consistently seek for avenues or opportunities to achieve self improvement.

See Also: 10 Key Points To Self Improvement

Below are 20 practical ways to improve yourself:

1. Think and take action to become better than yesterday and today

Your enemy of a better tomorrow is usually your successes or achievements of yesterday. Don’t be held bound by the abilities and achievements of yesterday and today. They may become obsolete pretty soon. You must avoid living in your past glories.

Always strive to outdo your past results. It is best to keep a better result in focus and reach out to make it happen.  There is always a bigger result. There is always a bigger you.

2. Educate your mind and heart

There is so much an educated mind or heart can achieve. This process is beyond the certificates we get from the schools. It is an action you take to enlighten, illuminate, light up your heart and mind. It is keeping abreast of the facts and to be consistent with today’s way of doing things. A practical way to improve yourself.

The best way to become enlightened in your mind or your heart is to read books daily especially books written by authors who themselves have worked on their personalities and are successful. There is a force or energy that can come out of an enlightened mind.

When you feed your mind with the right books, you receive the right knowledge. The right knowledge causes you to take the right actions. The right actions bring the right result.

Here are some books I personally have read that enlightened me so much and I recommend them to you – The Power of Your Mind, Recreating Your World, Think and Grow Rich, Living the 80/20 Way, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

3. Learn a new language

Learning new languages accords one competitive edge in career choices. It gives you better advantages during negotiations with foreigners. It aids communication and relationship when you travel abroad.

Learning new languages helps you establish deep connections and cross cultural friendships.

4. Skill Up and Level Up Your Skills

A good practical way to improve yourself is to level up your skills. When you learn new skills, you open yourself to opportunities, increase your motivation, make yourself more relevant, more adaptable, and interesting. New skills helps you get better jobs and more money.

On the other hand, you must do your best to upgrade your already existing skills. What you know might have become obsolete with time. So, to remain relevant, then you must level up your skills.

5. Work on your fears

Fear works against your personal progress and growth in life and paralyses your ability to take actions. If  you let fear control your feelings, thoughts, behaviors and decisions, you will only succeed in making your mind a slave to fear. Often times, fear comes as a result of feeling of inadequacy or inability,  thought of past failures, disappointments.

To overcome fears, first of all identify the thoughts, situations or incidents that make you fear when you remember them. After identifying your fears, then face your fear.

Don’t run away from your fears. If you run away, they remain and you meet them some other time, but if you face them, you handle them and eliminate them and they will never exist anymore.

6. Wake up early

Sleeping less does not automatically guarantee success. It matters what you are doing when you deny yourself much sleep. Waking up early gives you the opportunity to achieve what others who were sleeping while you were awake cannot achieve. Use this practical way to improve yourself.

To improve your productivity and quality of life, you may consider reducing your sleeping time especially when you have special projects or goals to achieve. Most successful people, studies have shown, sleep less than 6 hours a day.

7. Create for yourself a room that inspires

There are some environments that motivate or inspire you, that set the tone for productivity, that inspire you to be at your peak every time while there are some environments that are irritating, that demoralize or discourage your desire to study.

You can be inspired always to study because of the kind of study furniture you have in your room. You can stay glued to your computer system as a result of the type of PC you have got.

So, seek to create for yourself an inviting room for studying.

8. Schedule an exercise routine for yourself

Exercises make you very lively and active. You become a better you when you are in a better physical, emotional and psychological shape. Jogging at least 3 times in a week and at least 30 minutes each time you jog can make a whole lot of difference in your system.

You can put together in your schedule for exercises, jogging, skipping and gym lessons for variation.

9. Make friends with progressive minds

Practical ways to improve yourself involves making friends. Starting out with the process of self improvement, it is always natural to become careful with the kind of association, friendship you keep around you. Some friends can make you, while others can mar you. Some friends are dream releasers while others are dream killers.  So you must make a choice between having friends that will build you up and those that will kill your dreams, or your ideas and visions.

Avoid by all means any one who has good enough reasons your ideas, visions, prospects might not work. Avoid any one who always know someone who dared it and failed. I always believe that whatever someone, somewhere tried and failed, someone elsewhere has tried it out and had results. You must give your ideas, your vision a shot.

10. Don’t remain at your comfort zone

Please avoid comfort zones to implement practical ways to improve yourself. To avoid stagnation, lack of progress, you must take a step to the next and higher level of your life. This does not come by choosing to always be at a comfortable state. People say “No pain, no gain”.

Real success and making progress have a lot in connection with hard work and sweat. Normal people achieve normal and usual results. Shake up things and do things differently. Doing things differently bring out the leader in you. You learn a lot new things when you expose yourself to new contexts.

11. Set major goals for yourself

A life without targets and goals will make one lazy, unfocused, visionless and less productive. Targets and goals make you spring into action. It helps you to plan because you are looking at a result within a timeline.

Look for practical ways to improve yourself by setting goals. To achieve your target and goals, you must write them down conspicuously where you can always see them. You will need to let someone know about your goals and targets and the timeline you have set to achieve them. This will increase the likelihood that you stick to your goals to make them happen because you would not also want to look like a failure to the one you have told.

You must also break your goals down and write down how you plan to achieve them, then get to work immediately.

12. Recognize your results and  reward yourself

Give yourself a treat any time you achieve a milestone. Look at your checklist at different times to mark the achievements you have made based on the set targets and goals. Applaud yourself, reward yourself if you have made progress.

You can buy for yourself new gadgets, new clothes, or shoes. So, anytime you see these things, you remember they came because you made some progress in your self improvement journey. This will spur you up to do more. And of course, you may well inspire someone around you to self improvement journey too.

13. Never procrastinate

Many dreams have wasted today because of this word ‘procrastination’.  Most things people procrastinate never get done. In your self improvement journey, you must eschew procrastination. There is time for everything on the face of the earth.  Get your life regimented to have time for everything you do. Don’t take things as the come. Schedule how you want to do them. The best practical way to improve yourself.

Do everything for today, today. Avoid by all means possible carry-overs.

14. Avoid excuses

Excuses never let us do anything. Never always agree with reasons that will not allow you to take a step. People say that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. So, don’t consider the journey or the miles. Think about taking the first step towards the thousand miles. Each step taken is a mile covered. Each step not taken is a mile not covered.

15. Don’t just read the news, make the news

Anytime, I see Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates in the news, I begin to talk to myself about making the news one day like them.

I once had a boss who always bought for me the newspapers to read because he noticed I was always working on my PC. He thought he could distract me a little. Well, I always received the newspapers with many thanks, but I always will say to him “Sir, I just don’t want to read the news only, but I want to always make the news so that people can read about me”. You see it’s good to be read or seen in the news by others.

Hey! if you must be in the news, be there for the right things, for the solutions you have brought to the world and not in the news for the negative things stories. So go ahead and make the news!

16. Identify your Shortcomings or deficiencies

Everyone has shortcomings one time or the other. It will be of utmost importance to identify your shortcomings or deficiencies, acknowledge them and take major steps to address them.

What do you think are your shortcomings? What are the shortcomings you can work on now? How do you want to address them? These are the major questions you must always put before you. Remember what you are after is better you.

17. Follow those who inspire you positively

Get inspiration or motivation from people you admire. Anyone who inspires or motivates you must possess or reflect certain qualities you want to have for yourself too. Find out how they got to where they are and follow through.

What are the qualities in them you want to have for yourself? How can you acquire these qualities?

18. Get a mentor or personal coach

To avoid making many mistakes as you try out things all alone. To achieve milestones faster in the right way, you might require a mentor or a personal coach. This is someone who will take you by the hands and work you through the paths of self improvement.

Clients I have personally guided at their requests, achieve significantly more and better results than they would if they had worked alone.

19. Go the lonely path

There are times to separate yourself from every other person. To be a huge success, there is always this lonely path to go and is a path to more discoveries of yourself. Many people do not want to go through this lonely path though. Leadership is more a lonely path than exhibiting social media energy.

Folks may say a lot of things about you at this time. They may call you names, but don’t worry because at this time you want to focus inwards to discover and rediscover you.

20. Start a blog about personal development

You can document your success stories. The actions and steps you took to achieve certain milestones. These can become a personal guide for someone else out there who is seeking self improvement. In fact, if you are reading this article now, I think you must have been desiring to improve yourself. May be in your search, you came across this article.

See what to do. Consider the points made here again and again. Follow them and see how much improvements you can make and remember to reward yourself well when you achieve results.

SEE YOU AT THE TOP!!!

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