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What is personal development?

In the world of PR that I work in, personal development is a crucial element. The media responds to people at their peak. Driven people seeking to achieve their best attracts interest. What people create and achieve when they are out there pushing themselves and striving for incredible heights is galvanizing. You can be maximally effective in attracting media attention when you offer something that represents your best.

So I am constantly asking my clients to tell me what they can do or say that will help the people they can help the most.

When you give people your best, people will give you attention. They will respect what you say or offer. This is one of the most important rules of getting publicity. Be your best. Offer your best. Give your best. Entertain, educate, advise, help, do the very best you can.

And pack these golden nuggets of wisdom that you can offer into a news release of about 250 words or less so that you can communicate your best in ten to thirty seconds.

Okay, it’s not that easy to do, but if you focus on personal development, you’ll understand what I mean. This is a very powerful and important tactic. This is what lies at the core of the problem solving tips article or the talk show interview.

It’s worth the time and effort it takes to develop yourself personally and professionally.

It takes guts and time and effort. You also have to look inward and acknowledge your strengths and weaknesses.

You also need to decide to do something to better yourself. This is a choice. You choose to improve. You act to improve. You get better.

Of course, the alternative is to do nothing, and stay the way you are.

When you develop yourself you improve how you behave with other people. You communicate better. You deliver better advice, information, problem solving analysis, and you also learn to be more useful and more effective in a wider range of situations.

This makes you versatile and capable. People listen. They act upon your advice. They learn to trust you. This is what expertise and a track record of successful performance brings to you.

This is what comes from personal development.

Media are attracted to confidence, energy, exuberence, and they know quality when they see it. This is why personal development is so important to your ability to get publicity.

This video packs a lot of punch in a very short period of time. Brian Tracy, Zig Ziglar, Les Brown, Jeffrey Gitomer, Jim Rohn, talk about what it is you need to know to improve yourself.

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Jim Rohn is an amazing teacher. He was broke and 25 years old when he met an extraordinary man who taught him some very important and basic things. These things are life changing.

Here is a short session where he explains two very simple concepts that are crucial to making changes in your attitude and how you view what you are doing in your life and work.

1. Success is something you attract by the person you become.

2. Profits are better than wages.

Now once you hear and understand a little more about what he says about these ideas then you’ll grasp the amazing insights and power that flows from these nuggets of wisdom.

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John Maxwell offers insights into why the things you do today matters. In this seven minute video he talks about identifying how to choose what’s important.

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We’ve been traveling this week, visiting colleges around the west.  So this post will be quick and short. 

Listening to so many talented and energetic tour guides makes me think of what I would have done if I was in my 20’s again.   It came to me that I would have made better plans and goals for myself.   

So here is Zig Ziglar, one of my all time heroes of sales talking on his process for setting goals.   

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Jim Rohn is a very bright, very funny, insprational and entertaining person and his ideas and recommendations will make you more valuable and hence you will be able to charge more. This wonderful three video series from Nightingale Conant explains what you have to do to yourself rather than what you have to do at work.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Want more? Visit Jim Rohn . He offers a free weekly newsletter.

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This is one of the most important books I’ve read in a long time. Andy Andrews lived a relatively normal life until the age of nineteen, when both his parents died - his mother from cancer, his father in an automobile accident. He left college and was homeless. Penniless, he lived under the boardwalk or slept in people’s garages in Gulf Shores, Alabama. The something amazing happened. He befriended another grizzled old homeless person, who gave him a remarkable gift- a library card. Over time, he read more than two hundred biographies of great men and women searching for the answer to how they achieved success. Andy sent people letters asking for advice. “How did you overcome your worst challenge?” he’d ask. To his utter surprise, many of them they wrote back. And he saved those letters and pondered and savored the incredible life saving advice that they contained.

Guess what! There is no secret! It took several years, but Andrews finally determined that there were seven characteristics that each successful person had in common. He also found out he could teach people these remarkably powerful principles by telling witty and funny stories that deliver profound meaning. He became a stand up comedian in Las Vegas and started writing. He eventually wrote over 20 books including The Traveler’s Gift, which has now sold over a million copies and spent seventeen weeks on the New York Times best sellers list.

His new book is Mastering the Seven Decisions That Determine Personal Success , a companion book The The Traveler’s Gift. Andrews shares the very best of what he’s learned about how each one of us can achieve success and what it takes to make the crucial basics stick. It’s a roadmap to correct personal behavior that contains lots of helpful guidance for people at with problems at home, at work, and at play.

Andy Andrews believes that each one of us has the ability to change the world. He’s learned that even when you have nothing, every choice you make matters. Even more important, every choice you do not make matters just as much.

Andy is a believer in what is known as The Butterfly Effect. Even the smallest tiny action can have dramatic consequences. The flap of a butterfly’s wings, is inexplicably intertwined with the birth of a hurricane around the world.

Even the smallest things we do can have a tremendous impact on the world.

Andy is the first to point out that the seven principles, at first blush, don’t seem very profound. “They can have impact once you really grasp how they’ve been used by other people. Then they become an amazing key to releasing incredible personal power that allows you to explore the world of opportunity that surrounds all of us.”

The point of this is simple: Learn the Seven Decisions. They work every time.

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Bob Proctor is one of the incredible people who was featured in the book The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. This five minute segment is one of interviews conducted by Larry King. I enjoyed watching Larry quickly take control of a live caller in who asked to go a direction he didn’t want to go. Here they tackle some of the important elements of the power of choice in our every day lives.

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