Do you want to become the best version of you? Or at least start taking the necessary steps to start being more productive, more creative, happier and more confident?
There are many ways to do this and some of them involve taking a deep look at yourself and discovering who you really are and what you really want from life.
But while this can work, there are also some much more practical and easy strategies you can use to keep growing and improving. In this short report, we’ll take a look at the five things you need to do if you want to continue to grow and improve.
These are concrete steps that anyone can take but they can’t help you improve and develop over time.
1. Learn
One of the most important things you can do to continue to develop and grow is to learn. That means you have to keep taking on new challenges, discovering new things, and developing new skills and abilities.
Maybe you attend an electronic engineering seminar. Maybe you go to dance class. Maybe you teach yourself how to use a new piece of software to further your career. Or maybe you learn a new language.
Whichever option you choose, continuing to learn will help make your brain more plastic, as it produces neurotransmitters associated with the growth and development of neurons and neural connections.
It will produce more brain-derived neurotrophic factor, more dopamine, more norepinephrine, and more. And as a result, you will find that all new subjects are easier to learn and your brain will be more similar to that of a much younger person.
The same is true for the brain as it is for the body: you can grow and improve, or you can atrophy and deteriorate. The body is always changing: it is simply up to you whether it changes for the better or for the worse.
And if nothing else, continually learning new things will give you a broader mind, a wider range of experiences and skills to draw on, and a ton of useful knowledge. And the new ideas and concepts that you can come up with as a result of combining experience from many different fields are almost limitless. This is how you become a ‘scholar’ like Da Vinci, Newton or Elon Musk.
Make time to learn!
2.Travel
Traveling is incredibly important not only for your happiness and sense of accomplishment and purpose, but also for making you a more whole and even more decent human being.
Did you know that people are rated as more tolerant and understanding if they went to college? This has nothing to do with education or background: it’s simply that people who have moved away from home have less narrow viewpoints and a better understanding of the world in general.
And this is even more true for those people who travel far and wide and mingle with other cultures and see other places for themselves. This broadens your mind and gives you a ‘bigger picture’ view. It can also help you put things into perspective a bit and realize that many of your problems and concerns are actually somewhat insignificant compared to the hunger and poverty you encounter in other parts of the world.
People who have traveled and had adventures will naturally be more interesting to talk to because they will have a wide variety of experiences to share and because they will seem more worldly and knowledgeable. But it’s just rubbing shoulders with people from different cultures and experiencing unique places that will really develop you.
To dig a little deeper into our understanding of how travel can change and improve a person, it is worth considering the philosophies of Georg Hegel. Hegel believed that it was crucial that we challenge our ideas in order to develop them into a more accurate worldview.
He described this as requiring a specific process. The ‘thesis’ is the original idea you have. The antithesis is the opposite view. And the synthesis is the resulting idea that takes lessons from both points of view.
In order for us to be as informed and effective as possible, it is crucial that we challenge our existing ideas and build on them by incorporating other ideas.
Refusing to do this otherwise will eventually result in our own demise, as we become more and more attached to outdated and irrelevant concepts.
Without these external views and experiences to challenge us, we simply become more and more extreme in our own views. This happens through ‘confirmation bias’ as we seek more knowledge to confirm what we already believe to be true.
And it happens through ‘convergence’ and ‘divergence’, the probability of ingroups becoming more similar to each other and less similar to outgroups.
We can look to nature for a good analogy. In nature, the most important thing for the survival of our DNA is diversity.
We seek out partners for procreation because they are different from us and because they introduce new genetic material into our makeup.
If we continue on bread, then the flaws and imperfections in our DNA are exaggerated to the point where we can even become deformed or sick as a species.
On the contrary, having offspring with people from different cultures and from different regions will create stronger DNA that is less prone to disease.
The same goes for our ideas. That is why it is so good for us as a species to overcome borders and differences and interact with others that are as diverse and varied as possible. By constantly challenging and re-evaluating your ideas and beliefs, you will gain stronger, more accurate, and more useful ideas and beliefs.
Traveling is one of the best things you can do for your mind and soul.
3. Meditate
If there’s one new habit you should consider adopting, then it’s meditation. Meditation is simply practiced focus and concentration. Here, you will put yourself in a calm environment and then focus on clearing your mind of unwanted and distracting thoughts.
You will be reflecting on stressful topics and gradually get better at concentrating and staying calm.
This is an incredibly powerful ability because it gives you the ability to overcome stress and panic and remain calm no matter what is going on around you.
This can make you a happier person, as you’ll be less bothered by hard days at work or big deadlines, but it can also make you more effective as you gain better control over your emotional response, more emotional stability, and the ability to focus. plus. effectively in assigned tasks.
And did you know that meditation physically changes the structure of the brain? It has been shown to increase “cortical thickness”, which means there is more gray matter and a better density of neural connections.
Studies also show that meditation can improve concentration, focus, emotional stability, and even IQ. In other words, meditating makes you a more focused and even smarter person.
This can be a difficult habit to acquire, especially if you are not familiar with how meditation works, or perhaps have never considered it in the past.
The simplest form of mediation is mindful meditation. Here, you just sit somewhere quiet and “watch” your thoughts go by. The idea is to let them pass like clouds without getting involved in them or worrying about their content.
Don’t beat yourself up for letting your mind wander, just make a note of the thought and then dismiss it. Not only does this teach you to get past your thoughts and worry less about them, but it also helps you gain a better understanding of the contents of your own mind so that you can predict your own reactions to future scenarios.
If you’re having a hard time finding the time to commit, try meditating for just 7 minutes a day. This amount of time is short enough that you can slide it without too much difficulty, but it will be enough to start causing significant changes in the way your brain works.
4. Exercise
It may not be the most exciting or even surprising item on this list, but it’s absolutely crucial to make exercise a part of your routine. Exercise isn’t just important as a way to get more physically fit — it can actually change your hormonal balance and even your brain in profoundly positive ways.
Did you know that exercise, both CV and resistance training, can increase your IQ and increase your focus? One possible explanation for how resistance training might achieve this is by helping with ’embodied cognition’.
Embodied cognition is a theory about how the brain works that suggests we actually understand things using our bodies and our memories of our interactions with the world: when we hear a story about someone being cold, we actually remember what it’s like. to be cold and even feel it slightly with our body.
Training can strengthen your connection to your body and by doing so will improve your use of understanding foreign concepts.
At the same time, getting in better shape will improve your energy levels, help you sleep better, make you less likely to get sick, make you more attractive, allow you to look better in your clothes, increase your confidence, improve your physical performance in the sport and competition, it will make you more capable of taking care of yourself in a physical confrontation and much, much more.
Again, you don’t need to commit to large amounts of exercise right away. Just a few workouts a week can be enough to start making a difference and you can take this relatively easy at least at first!
5. Grooming and styling
Everything else on this list is about making you healthier, calmer, and more worldly. These are profound changes that will affect you from the inside out. But grooming yourself and taking care of your sense of style is different.
This is an example of a change that happens from the outside in: it’s something immediate and easy you can change about yourself that will then start to make you feel better inside.
What I’m trying to say is: don’t dismiss this as trite and superficial. Taking care of your appearance is essentially a way of investing in yourself and showing that you value your appearance.
This sends a powerful signal to others that makes you appear more capable, more confident, and much more attractive. As a result, it can help you increase your chances of landing a job interview, of attracting a member of the opposite sex, and of walking into a room and getting noticed for all the right reasons.
What’s more, the feeling of confidence you get from looking and feeling amazing can help you feel better about yourself and, as a result, be happier and more content.
Start by choosing to invest a little more financially in what you wear and how you fix it.
It is better to have fewer clothes but for those clothes to be better made. And they say your haircut should directly reflect the amount of money you’re responsible for in your career. Ever heard the phrase ‘dress for the job you want’?
Consider talking to a style consultant, certainly be willing to step out of your comfort zone a bit and find time to groom yourself regularly.
Oh, and definitely invest in the future: if you want to feel amazing 10 years from now, moisturizing and protecting yourself from the sun will go a long way!