“To be human is to live our highest potentials”
We as a human always dream of fame, success, and growth. We struggle in our lives to live to our highest potential. We are struggling to achieve growth and excellence on personal, profession and academic level. Many of us are aware of what it takes to grow and succeed while most of us are not aware of how one can be successful and can achieve excellence on all levels. Most of us want excellence but are not ready to strive for achieving excellence. To grow and achieve excellence, we should make excellence as our top priority in all aspects of our lives and it can be achieved by always striving to do better.
Excellence is the condition of surpassing some standards of expectations.
Many people around us who do not strive for excellence, have hard time and do not feel happy with their lives. While people who always strive for excellence, feel happy, have inner satisfaction and contribute positively to others as well, thus excellence is the condition of surpassing some standards of expectations. Personal excellence is a lifelong process of developing mental and emotional skills to do better and better in all aspects of our lives, and to achieve personal excellence, we need to focus our personal growth and development.
Personal Excellence comes first (Stephen Covey)
Personal Excellence is the journey of positive development beyond one’s self and is a step by step process of improving oneself in every aspect of life. Although the process is difficult and requires patience but it benefits those who want to live a successful and happy life. Personal excellence is to improve your performance consistently and continuously so that you can improve every aspect of your life – family, education, career, finance, relationship etc. Personal excellence does not reflect perfection and being perfectionist. It is a process of becoming better of oneself, and do better and better in all aspects of life.
To achieve something that you have never achieved before you must become someone that you have never been before. (Les Brown)
We as an individual, without looking at our personal skills that are the root causes, try to deal with challenges around us which includes work, family, friends, career and finance etc. We grow and succeed only when we have mastery over ourselves. Thus to understand the personal excellence there are different dimensions of it which includes;
- Discipline
- Commitment
- Emotional Control
- Attitude and focus
- Belief and Courage
- Calmness and destruction control
- Self Evaluation
Those who have achieved personal excellence live a productive life, enjoy healthy relationships and have international satisfaction. It manifests in self defined and self valued achievement that reflects one’s best efforts. The keys to unlock personal excellence is the will to win, the desire to succeed and the urge to reach one’s full potential. Some of the key steps one can take in this regard are; believing in self, set realistic high goals, keep learning and growing one’s skills, challenge yourself out of comfort zone, and have best people around and be around best people. The critical element of the personal excellence are as follows;
- Self Awareness
- Vision and life purpose
- Positive emotions and learning attitude
- Skills set and abilities
- Adaptability
- Self accountability
- Self transparency
- Growth mindset
To gain personal excellence there could be different ways but following are the different steps that can help you in achieving personal excellence;
Step 1: Self Evaluation
Knowing your strengths, weakness, thoughts and emotions, life principles and beliefs are key to personal excellence and self evaluation play key role in achieving personal excellence. It is the foundation in gaining personal excellence as it helps you understand yourself deeper, explore your mind, thoughts and attitudes and understand how you deal with challenges. In this step you should do your SWOT analysis, think critical on your thought process and emotions, and understand the core beliefs you believe in and identify your life principles. You should spend time with self to fully reflect and explore yourself.
Step 2: Identifying Key Skills set
We all have different skill sets and it varies from individuals to individuals. In this step you should identify critically your skill set. Skill set identification is important in the process of achieving personal excellence because it gives right direction to utilize your best skills to perform better and better in all aspects of life. Identify skills that you are best in and utilize it for making yourself better and better in the process.
Step 3: Know What you Love
What makes you more satisfied and happy is, when you are doing things that you love the most, and you enjoy these well. Thus knowing what you really love to do in your life, is key to gaining personal excellence. You should evaluate yourself, understand yourself what you are good at and what you love to do in all aspects of life. Identify and know what you love do in your life.
Step 4: Life and Career Goals
Once you know your strengths, weakness, skill set and what you love, the very important aspect of personal excellence is identifying and defining your life and career goals. Work out on understanding and defining your life and career goals that what do you want to achieve in your life and in your career – what is your life goals and what is your career objective.
Step 5: Action plan
Action plan is what makes the process of personal excellence achievable. It’s critical that you make a detail action plan once you go through the above mentioned steps. Define a step by step actions which you will take to achieve your personal excellence – making yourself better and better version of yourself in all aspects of your life.
Step 6: Focus and Practice
Once you have made an action plan, remain focused and putting action plan in action, are key to successfully gain personal excellence. The famous saying “ Action speaks louder than words” is true here, as once you implement your action plan then you will be able to achieve personal excellence – perform better and better in all aspects of your life.
Step 7: Self Evaluation and Feedback
In this whole process as explained above, self evaluation and feedback from others play important role in helping you understand your progress, and your performance. Evaluate yourself how you are performing. Are you able to put your action plan into action or not, and how effectively are doing and where you are performing not well.Critically evaluate yourself in this whole process and also reach out people whom you trust and take their feedback for improving yourself further.
Step 8: Revisit and Strategize yourself
In this whole process you should revisit yourself, think how you have performed and where you need more improvements. The self evaluation and feedback will help you identify key areas where you have improved and areas where you still need improvements. You should follow the same steps again and again to explore yourself more, revisit action plan and re-strategize it, to make yourself perform better and better. This is how you gain personal excellence when you are continuously working to improving yourself and working on self to perform better and better.
These steps provide you way how you can gain personal excellence, while you may also find some other ways and tools to achieve personal excellence which are also good source learning. This article is to help you understand the basics of personal excellence, importance of it and how you gain personal excellence. Personal excellence is a principle and it includes every actions that help you make yourself perform better and better, and utilize all your skills and qualities at a level which is above the standards., and is focused on your overall wellbeing and personal growth.
