Personal Development

All that can be made into personal development, from thoughts to hardware, from coaching to meditation.

Do You Know Your Twisted Roots?

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I don’t know about you, but I love bonsai. Those little trees grown in trays sculpted with Japanese kanjis, you know them… The strange forms they had, the beautiful images they created in my mind… Until I read how they are actually created: artificially. That’s right, there is a technique of doing this: you take a tree, … Read more

Are You Ready To Be Happy?

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Too often, and for too many of us, happiness is just a distant image. A model of the world that we’ve been tought it’s like this, and not the other way around. A to-do list established by somebody else. A ready-made coat that we wear and try to feel comfortable in it. Or a feed … Read more

Personal Development Techniques

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Personal development is a process. Is not a single task that you do once, and then forget about it. It’s a continuous hunt for your next crossroad, your next challenge that you need to take, the next obstacle that you have to overcome. It’s personal, so you do have an original approach. You use only tools and techniques that are working for you. You experience what’s the best and then refine it. Use it and refine it.

Here’s my personal list of my most used techniques for personal development. As things will evolve I will come back with more and more informations for each specific technique.

In chronological, Last In First Out, order:

  1. GTD = Getting Things Done.

    Getting Things Done is a methodlogy created by David Alled. It is one of the latest techniques that I tried, liked and implemented it. At the first level, GTD is focused toward business people, managers and busy persons. But it can be used for anybody that just wants to clarify its life and enjoy it more. GTD has several concepts:

    • You are an information processing machine. You process stuff. So, you must establish a consistent way to deal with it. The process of GTD is to analyse stuff and do the following: is it actionable? if YES, you move to the next step, if NO, you just chose from one of the three options: toss it (no loner needed, garbage), put it in a Someday/Maybe list (you want to action on this sometime), or file it (in a reference system, to be used lately).
    • If you answered YES at the first question, is it actionable, you have to decide “what’s the next action”: if there are more, you create a project, if the action is less than 2 minutes, you are doing it now, if the action does not involves you directly, you delegate it, and if it can’t be done right now, you just defer it for later, in your calendar.
    • You repeat this every day, and, most important, every week. The actual repetition, or implementation of the process, is the most juicy part of GTD. And most difficult.
    • Another key concept is “mind like water”, meaning one’s capacity to react to some stimulus with the exact quantity of energy needed, and then regain the initial, quiet status, much like a water surface after launching a rock in it. You achieve that by constantly learning how to “empty your RAM”, which is another key concept.

    I am using GTD for about three months now and the benefits are extremely visible. I benefited the most by the “empty your RAM” exercise, and the daily/weekly review.