If you’re hoping to level up in your career, one of the career strategies you can work on is improving your personal development skills. Looking inward to make big changes in your life and then going out to achieve those big things is what personal development is all about. If someone recently sat you down and told you to improve your personal development skills, this article is for you. We’ll share all the ways you can approach your personal growth and development to become the best version of yourself and achieve the peak of who you’re meant to be.
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15 Ways to Improve Your Personal Development Skills in 2024
1. Face your fears
One of the scariest things we’ll face in life is letting go. Letting go of who we once were to make way for someone better to step in. Some people get really stuck in the idea of having specific characteristics and traits that they feel define them, even if they’re not positive traits to have at all. Our identities are constantly evolving if we’re willing to allow ourselves to grow as a person. To improve your personal development skills, you’ll need to have an honest look at yourself and ask yourself, “What traits need to go? How can I better manage myself? How can I step outside of my comfort zone? What new habits do I need to build?” And by looking at all these areas, we can make tweaks to ourselves to reach the best version of who we could be. Maybe you realize the thing holding you back in life is your low confidence, so you take the first step towards becoming more confident. You might change how you dress, take some public speaking classes, ask people for feedback, and spend more time with people who build you up instead of tear you down.
2. Learn new skills
One of the ways you can develop your personal development skills is by learning new skills. You can dive into the world of soft skills to develop yourself as a person you’re genuinely excited to be. Some of the common skills associated with personal development include: communication, adaptability, problem solving, leadership, time management, organization, and many more. You can work with a coach or someone you admire who’s developed these skills to help you better master these areas. Learning how to master interpersonal relationships can also help you develop yourself as a person.
3. Read more books
To improve your personal development skills, you'll likely want to read more books. The quality of the books you read will make a difference. It’s about reading books where you’ll learn how to communicate better, better present yourself, improve your interactions with others, and build upon positive values and traits that people possess. You might also read books about topics on more hard skills, to become better well rounded in your craft. Or to become a better conversationalist. By reading books on a range of topics, you’ll become a more well-rounded person, which will in turn improve your personal development skills. You’ll become more intelligent, more informed, and you’ll likely make better decisions with your newfound knowledge.
4. Get feedback from others
You can’t know which direction to grow in without feedback from others. When you get accurate feedback, you’ll know what you need to work on. Reflect on all feedback you get to see what the truth is. If you keep getting the same negative feedback from all sorts of people, then it probably is something about yourself that needs to be improved upon. Sometimes, people give feedback superficially or because they’re in a bad mood, but the feedback isn’t constructive. You’ll need to evaluate carefully to ensure you mold yourself in the best way possible. If your gut says something someone says is true and you should work on it, then you can dive into articles, books, courses, or coaching to work on the problem. Remember, that while feedback can be hard to hear sometimes, making changes to yourself to improve your personal development skills can be really rewarding once you’ve put in the work to elevate who you are as a person. The end result makes all the hard work worth it.
5. Meet more people
If you’re looking to develop personally, it’s crucial to meet more people. Interacting with people of all walks of life can give you more poise, perspective, empathy, and so much more. People who’ve been through hardships can teach you so many valuable lessons about how to treat others, how to overcome obstacles, or how to add more meaning to your life. People who’ve achieved great things in life can teach you how to never give up, how to think strategically, how to lead someone to greatness, and how to communicate. Everyone can teach you something, their life experiences can guide you on your journey to becoming a better version of yourself. Learning as much as you can from the people around you (and further from you) can help you build your character and dictate your life choices.
6. Learn from others
There are so many people around you that you can learn from. Top communicators will often write books on how to communicate better, business people will often create courses teaching people how to succeed online, and experts will go to conferences to share their pearls of wisdom. You might not be able to always meet the elite in the areas you want to improve your skills in, but you can still learn from others. There’s so many intelligent, worldly, and experienced people out there who can teach you a trick or two.
7. Take care of your brain
To improve your personal development skills, you need to take good care of your brain. Eating healthy foods, exercising, building good habits, minimizing addictions, and playing brain games are all ways you can take care of your brain. The difference between a good brain and a bad brain boils down to how you’ll interact in the world. If you don’t take care of your brain, you might end up spewing out more negativity, cycling bad thoughts which push you further away from your wants and needs, and attracting more chaos into your life. People who take good care of their brain will have more positive thoughts, aim to build up the people around them, and don’t take negative feedback as toxic criticism but as areas to build upon. How willing we are to grow, support the people around us, and how we interact with others usually boils down to our mental health. When we work on building a strong and healthy mind, we’ll find building personal development skills to be easy.
8. Work with a coach
You can work with a coach to help you improve your personal development skills. Whether it’s communication, leadership, problem-solving, time management, or emotional intelligence. You can find coaches for all areas. For example, if you’re looking for a leadership coach, you might search for executive coaching, leadership coaching, executive presence coaching, or some other variant. If you’re looking to improve your communication skills, you might work with a vocal coach if you’re trying to change the tone, pitch, or accent of your voice, conversation training coaches, or just a standard communication coach. No matter what area of your skills you’d like to develop, there’s a very specific type of coach out there who helps solve that exact problem. So, if you dig around enough, you can find a great coach who will help you expand your personal development skills.
9. Take risks
To improve your personal development skills you’ll need to take risks. Risk taking doesn’t need to mean putting yourself in danger, it can also be taking a bet on yourself to grow in a certain way. It could be changing jobs to grow into a leadership role, launching a business, signing up for a training program, speaking up in meetings, challenging the status quo, or entering a new industry for your career. If you’re thinking about doing a job change, you can use Huntr to build your resume online, tailor resumes for specific jobs, generate AI cover letters, track jobs and interviews, and more.
10. Work on your character
One of the most fulfilling things you can do in your life is work on your character. Treating yourself as an art piece that you’re constantly sculpting, working on, and improving can be a great joy. When we look at ourselves as an ever-changing and ever-growing individual, improving personal development skills can be such an enlightening and enjoyable experience. Often, when we resist change and growth, it can be dreadful to hear feedback that we have areas of improvement. When we’re open to the idea that we can get better with time, doing the inner work to improve who we are to evolve into someone even better can be the most meaningful change of our lives.
11. Challenge yourself
To improve your personal development skills, you’ll need to challenge yourself. Without challenge, there’s little growth. To learn new skills, whether it be communication or interpersonal skills, you’ll need to step outside of your comfort zone to grow and evolve. That might mean setting up more coffee dates to improve your conversation skills, even though you’re more introverted or shy. It could also mean being more intentional and thinking before you speak instead of just saying what’s on your mind. Maybe you push yourself to test your dedication by building a daily habit to do something you’ve never done before.
12. Attend a workshop
One of the best ways to improve your personal development skills is to learn from others, a great way to find great people to learn from is by attending workshops. Most people attend conferences to learn hard skills like marketing or sales. But you can find workshops for soft skills as well. You can find time management workshops, leadership ones, or conflict resolution classes. If you’re looking to develop soft skills, you can often search for the skill you’re looking to develop and workshop to find training programs to help you level up those skills.
13. Build better habits
To really develop new personal development skills, it’ll typically boil down to your habits. Do you have positive or negative habits? Do your habits help you achieve bigger and better things or do they lead you down the wrong path? If you find yourself constantly hitting a wall or stuck on a path, you likely have bad habits. The only way to overcome them is by creating new, positive habits. For example, if you find yourself overworking and doing the work of multiple people, you might find your growth stagnates. When you learn to delegate tasks to others, you now have more time to develop leadership skills or learn a new game-changing skill that unblocks you.
14. Chart your progress
You can’t know if you’re moving in the right direction unless you know where you’ve started. Making a chart, keeping track of milestones in a document, or doing other things to showcase what you’re doing and what you’ve accomplished each day or week will help you see your transformation unfold. Without charting the fine details of what you’re doing to put in the work, it can be hard to see that what you’re doing is making progress. If you don’t measure your results, you’re just assuming there’s a positive change when there might not be one. Use data, track details, and put it all in writing to prove that you’re doing the work, and you’re getting good results from it.
15. Grow in your career
To improve your personal development skills, you’ll need to grow in your career. Growth doesn’t always mean vertical growth, it can be horizontal growth too. Maybe you learn complementary skills like leading meetings, presenting your work, or speaking up. Challenge yourself to grow in your career can open up more opportunities to develop even better skills. And if you’re thinking about that vertical growth, a higher position in your company or another one, it’s key to start practicing that behavior before moving into that role so you showcase you do have what it takes. If you’re looking to make a career change, you can sign up for Huntr to help you manage your job search.
Nicole Martins Ferreira
Nicole Martins Ferreira, Senior Writer at Huntr, brings a rich background in marketing, tech, and ecommerce to craft insightful content on job search strategies and career advancement. With experience from Super Magic Taste to Shopify, she excels in creating engaging, actionable advice for job seekers.
Nicole's expertise in SEO and content marketing, honed across diverse roles, enables her to effectively guide individuals through the complexities of the job market. Her contributions at Huntr are vital, offering readers valuable tips and strategies to navigate their professional journeys successfully, making her work an invaluable resource for job seekers everywhere.