All of us want to be a better person, whether to make us more marketable, or to make us better friends and family members.
Unfortunately, it can be hard to know where to start or how to go about it. I want to share five things that you can incorporate into your everyday life to become a better you.
1. STOP Comparing Yourself to Others
A recent article by the Harvard Business Review says that one of the biggest stumbling blocks that we can trip over on the road to self-improvement is gauging ourselves based on other people.
It's okay to have people who inspire you, but like I said in the introduction, it's about you becoming a better you, becoming a more developed person, not becoming a different person.
If you base your progress on someone else, you'll either never achieve your goals or achieving your goals will mean going against your true nature.
2. Read a Lot
Most resources on self-development recommend reading. Most of them talk about instruction manuals or self-help books. If that's your kind of literature than that's great, but you should also know that there are other options.
Non-fiction books teach us about the world and help us to dive deeper into the body of knowledge behind our own interests. They can also help us to make decisions in our own lives based on the experiences of those who have gone before us.
On the other hand, studies have shown that fiction books help us to develop our sense of empathy. Empathy, or the ability to relate to the experiences of other people, should be in the toolbox of anyone who hopes to be a better person because it helps us to relate better to others and to make more conscientious decisions.
Becoming intimately interested in the experiences of another person, even if that person is fictional, can be good practice for developing our emotional skills for when we meet other people in the real world.
3. Don't Try to Live in a Vacuum
An article by Inc. Magazine referred to finding other people to help us along the road to self-betterment. This may seem like awkward advice. After all, my first two tips were about not relying on others.
You don't want to become a better you by trying to become someone else, but what's the point of becoming a better you if you try to exist in isolation?
Develop your new life skills by socializing with others, whether it's friends or family or members of religious and social organizations.
4. Don't Just Start New Habits, Quit Old Ones
In an article on good habits for self-development, Lifehack.org reminds us that it is just as important to quit bad habits.
Picking up new tools to use in your everyday life is great, but sometimes that toolbox is cluttered with broken tools or other junk that we shouldn't be carrying around with us anymore.
Often these are habits that we picked up in our youth, maybe to cope with problems that we used to have but don't encounter anymore. If we keep old habits like this around for too long, they can start to create more problems than they solve.
5. Don't Limit Your Interests
The Harvard Business Review also reminds us that we should become better people by becoming well-rounded people. We won't become great people by developing our skills in one particular area, the world is too complicated for that.
Instead of diving head strong into one thing, try to make little changes throughout your day in a variety of different ways.