Personal Development for Your Benefit
Guest Editor – Anna Petersen
How do you find the time and energy to enrich yourself?
The adage of “pay yourself first, then pay others” is given as advice on how to secure yourself financially, but it also applies to investing in your self-development. Every day, we have daily work tasks, our home upkeep, family needs and self-care.
Those are the minimum drains on your energy well. We may have challenging situations at home or work.
So, how do you find the time and energy to enrich yourself with personal development without burning out completely? If development becomes taxing and energy-draining, it’s time to switch it up.
Individual Development
There is a linear way to think of individual development as it pertains to your work position or your desired work position. If we look at individual development more as a many-forked path, the ability to find usefulness and excitement becomes more apparent.
Most companies offer a slew of online training, live webinars and opportunities to attend conferences to all their employees to ensure continuous development. If we see the path laid out before us and we march along because it is either what we are told to do, or what we think we are supposed to do, then we are not serving ourselves the best piece of pie.
Most of the workforce today has personal development built into their employees’ yearly goals. Some of that development might be mandatory compliance or corporate policy, or even position-based know-how and soft skills.
Working & Living Well
Developing your skills is only part of the struggle; we must also look after our work well-being. In this issue, LTEN Focus on Training debuts a new quarterly series of articles, Working & Living Well. Written by wellness expert and former Genentech trainer Deborah Bonzell, the articles debut in this issue.
Deb Bonzell will also deliver a series of 2022 webinars around wellness. Find out more and register at www.L-TEN.org/work_live_well.
There are many ways to interject development with little to no cost to get a taste of what else is out there. What interests you will encourage learning retention. Post-training use of new knowledge and skills will then increase your significance to others around you.
Enriching Experiences
Each of us has our preferred way to learn and if you can find enriching experiences within that preferred learning realm, the time and energy will not be so much of an effort. Do you prefer a live classroom event with an instructor leading the learning? Or are you more focused when working at home at your own pace? Perhaps you like to be in a community or social situation with like-minded individuals to share the learning experience? Maybe you are a mix of all of these.
Luckily, there are learning opportunities to fit your preferred style.
Don’t limit your development to what your day-to-day skills are; look to other jobs of interest or other industries. For example, if you are in sales training, maybe you find marketing interesting and want to know a bit more without a huge undertaking. Marketing may not be part of your job on paper, but marketing has many facets that can be applied to training, to sales, to corporate culture and to interpersonal communications.
Conclusion
Regardless of where you find your path to personal development, you and your company thrive from knowledge gained. Whether you are developing position-related skills through your company, or you seek a broader library of sources, the key to betterment is finding your personal return of investment and applying yourself.
Anna Petersen is senior manager, Genzyme Commercial Learning Operations, for Sanofi. Email Anna at anna.petersen@sanofi.com.
