5 psychological keys to boost your personal development in the new year
The end of the year is a good time to reflect on the changes that one wants to make at the gates of that new cycle that opens before us, the new year that is coming. And it can be an excellent opportunity to carry out a personal development process, either through self-taught learning or through psychotherapy and having professional support.
And it is that although it is true that January 1 is, in a way, "just a number", it is no less true that this time of the year is loaded with meaning and feelings linked to it due to cultural dynamics that we have been maintaining throughout the years. centuries. For this reason, as New Year's Eve approaches, we gain support that we can use to motivate ourselves and give it a push to those personal projects that excite us the most and that would allow us to learn the most in those areas of life that interest. In this sense, here we will give a review of the key ideas that can help you boost your personal development in the new year.
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The keys to reinforce your personal development at the beginning of a new year
People often want to change habits, beliefs, and ways of approaching their relationships, but they don't know how to do it. The best way to advance in this area of life is to attend psychological therapy, where you can learn to develop tools to generate changes in life taking advantage of the new year that starts.
Therefore, here you will find a summary of several of the most important principles of psychotherapy applied to personal development. These guidelines and ideas can help you build a personal development project that is sustainable and that persists beyond the first weeks of January.
1. Personal development is based on habits and routines
If you believe that embarking on the path of personal development consists of experiencing a kind of vital revelation or catharsis that will allow yourself to change overnight simply because you have imagined something or an idea has crossed your mind, you are wrong
No personal development process is sustained if it is not based on small habits and routines., simple and apparently banal actions that make their appearance on a daily basis. The key is perseverance, humility, and the certainty that everything important is learned on the fly by trying things and making mistakes through experience.
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2. You have to set realistic goals
It is one thing to be ambitious when it comes to setting goals, and another is daring to assume that we must aspire to achieve something practically impossible to, at least, stay halfway and have advanced a lot. The truth is that if you try this last strategy, you will most likely get frustrated and give up halfway. For this reason, initially you have to take stock of what you want to achieve, on the one hand, and your resources and abilities at the present moment, on the other.
Also, also it is advisable to make estimates on what is the best possible scenario and what is the worst possible scenario, to make projections into the future both from an optimistic perspective and from a perspective pessimistic, so that both visions offer a balanced image of what you can expect from the months that are to come.
3. Planning and segmenting tasks is essential
It is not enough to set reasonable goals; So that you don't find them too intimidating and cause you to throw in the towel prematurely, you should segment those objectives into several smaller parts and distributed sequentially, creating a chain of things to do that goes from the very short term (the next few hours) to the long term (the next months or years). In this way you will always have a clear notion of what your progress is in terms of personal development.
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4. Make sure that your personal projects are compatible with your values
If you set yourself goals that do not really correspond to your life aspirations, but are based on social pressure or what you think is desirable to gain the acceptance of the rest, you will notice that you are making an effort for nothing, and you will find yourself more lost than before.
5. Assume that it is normal not to always be motivated
No one is always 100%, wanting to launch themselves as soon as possible to carry out the tasks related to their personal development. It is normal to have ups and downs in mood and motivation levels; what it is about is that the moments of demotivation are not the predominant ones, and that you adopt the appropriate self-motivation strategies in each case.
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Do you want to have psychological support to give strength to your personal development?
If you are interested in having the professional help of a team of psychologists to accompany you in your development process and help you better understand what you need in your life and how you can achieve it, get in touch with us.
In UPAD Psychology and Coaching We can help you by offering face-to-face sessions or online via video call.