5 Tips for Getting the Most out of a Personal Development Course

As I was reading a post on Steve Pavalina’s personal development forum, I noted that somebody was discussing how to get the most out of your personal development reading. When I looked it made me start thinking about why personal development is really effective for some people and why other people think it’s a complete waste of time. Usually the latter never finish what they have started and so it becomes really easy not to take responsibility.

So, I wanted to break down in some steps how to get the most out of a personal development program. A while back I purchased an NLP course to get an understanding of hypnosis and that program gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten because it integrated the exact concepts it had into the content of the course. So, some of these ideas came from that and others are a combination of ideas from Tony Robbins, Wayne Dyer, and probably on some level from several of the blogs I read.

1. Active Listening: This is more or less what I would call phase 1 of starting a personal development course. The first time you go through it you are actively listening to it, and coming up with ideas, thinking about the concepts, and figuring out which ones apply to your life. Usually this phase is what separates the ones who make it from the ones who don’t. This is something you set aside time for and have to put effort into.

2. Passive Listening: Believe it or not this is of critical importance.  I’ve integrated a number of concepts from the Tao Te Ching into my life, just by playing as background noise. The background noise in your life quietly seeps into your subconscious. If you have the TV on in the background talking about all the crap you need to by to be happy or you have the news on talking about how the sky is falling and the world is going to hell, then that will seep into your subconscious.  If I’m stuck in traffic  I will sometimes just listen to a a few verses of the Tao Te Ching. The idea is that eventually you don’t have to think about personal development. It’s no longer an effort, it’s just the way your life is. You kick ass, you know it, and there’s no longer a need to convince your subconscious.

3. Repetition: If we’ve learned anything it is that our subconscious absorbs like a sponge the things that are repeated. Advertisers and marketers came to this realization ages ago. If you expect to listen to a personal development course once and get all it has to offer then you are fooling yourself. I’ve gone through the entire Personal Power II course at least 4 times and I still think I could do it again and get something out of it. One thing I learned from my interview with Lamar Smith, the author of There’s more to Life than the Corner Office is that we tend to remember our mistakes but forget the things that make us succeed.  So, if you truly want to get the most out of a personal development course, plan on listening to it more than once.

4. Commitment and Consistency: I wrote earlier about the importance of commitment and consistency, so I don’t want to dwell on this one too much. Simply put you have to be committed to your personal development course and develop consistency. One simple example of the power of commitment and consistency is this blog. I started blogging about a month ago to build my social media skill set, and have tangible evidence of my skill set to share with a potential employer. I have written almost every single day with the idea that I would only focus on content not traffic. The results were astonishing. I checked my analytics this morning:

5. Tracking/ Journaling: A written record of your efforts is another way to really stay on the ball. There’s a reason that all these courses come with journals and companion workbooks. It’s just another form by which your subconscious gets the message that this is REALLY IMPORTANT TO YOU.  I don’t know the exact amount of information we are exposed to every day, but it’s some outrageous number that is continually growing was we enter an age of information overload. So, your subconscious will really absorb the thing that you pay attention to most. I honestly think I’ve been able to accelerate and push fast forward in some of my efforts lately because this blog has been like my own personal development journal.

Tags: personal development course, personal power 2, anthony robbins, goal setting, success