We all know that personal growth is important if we want to move forward in life, get better, and achieve our goals.  But how consistent is your personal growth? If you are like many it goes in spurts.  You’ll have a period of time when you are doing all the right things: you are listening to CDs and podcasts and reading books.  Because you pursue these activities in spurts you also grow in spurts.  You grow for a little, and then stabilize.

What is interesting is that your progress towards your goals will end up following the same track.  When you are growing and pursuing personal growth activities you will be moving towards your goals. There is a direct relationship between personal growth activities and progress towards your goals.

So what’s the solution?  A small but consistent daily commitment to personal growth.

Just FIFTEEN minutes a day!

That’s all it takes.  Fifteen minutes a day can help you stay focused on your goals, moving forward, growing, and a step ahead of your competition.

Here’s how you can make the most of your fifteen minutes a day:

1. Those fifteen minutes a day must be FOCUSED.

They must be FOCUSED on the field or discipline that you need in order to achieve your primary goal.  If your primary goal is in sales, you should be pursing personal growth activities that help you be a better salesperson and stay motivated.  If your primary goal is your blog, you need to be learning about how to be a better blogger.  If your primary goal is to run a marathon, you need to be pursing activities that keep you excited, encouraged and learning how to be a better runner.

This means that other personal growth activities that you pursue don’t count towards your fifteen minutes.  Only activities directly connected to your primary goal count as your fifteen minutes a day.

2. Know the skills and abilities that you want to improve.

Based on your goals, you need to know what areas you need to get better at.  If you are a salesperson, perhaps you need to focus on closing skills or on understanding your customers.  If you are a blogger, you may want to learn about developing WordPress themes or improving your marketing skills.  What are the skills that you need to excel in to achieve your goals and be excellent in what you do.

3. The fifteen minutes a day must be consistent.

You need to do this every day without skipping.  Initially this might be hard.  You may forget, there may be other things going on, and it may feel like you don’t have time.  Even if it is the last thing you do before you go to bed at night make sure you take that fifteen minutes pursing focused growth.

Personal growth in this manner is a habit.  That means after a period of time it will become a lot easier perhaps even automatic.  It takes time to form a habit, but it is worth it.

4. Have someone hold you accountable

Anytime you are looking to pursue a goal or create a habit, you will have more success if you have someone holding you accountable.  As you work to create a fifteen minute a day of personal growth habit, you will be more likely to do it if you have people holding you accountable.  Ideally these should be people who are pursing a similar primary goal and as such are working on similar personal growth activities.

I have a group of four other people that I work with to hold each other accountable to our fifteen minute a day of personal growth.  We email each other every couple of days and share how we have spent our fifteen minutes of personal growth time.  Not only does that help keep us motivated but it serves as a way to share ideas on personal growth activities.

5. Engage in personal growth activities

Just do it!  The slogan that Nike uses is useful here.  You need to get started and just do your fifteen minutes of personal growth time.  What should you do?  There are many options:

• read a book (my top 10 books are listed here)
• listen to a training CD
• get an audio book from the library
• listen to podcasts (my top 10 podcasts are listed here)
• read inspiring blogs
• watch a TED presentation (my top 5 TED presentations are listed here)

There are lots of options, choose one and get started!

Fifteen minutes a day is not a lot of time.  You can learn a new skill, move towards your goals, and above everything else grow!

Written by:
Danny Gamache – The Success Professor
Follow me on Twitter: @successprof

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Over the past couple of weeks my articles have focused on the area of personal growth. Two weeks ago I shared 6 Steps to Grow Daily, and last week I followed it up with an article on How to Create a Reading Plan. This article will give you a starting point for developing your reading list as I share with you my top 10 book choices.

1. The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman

One of the best books I’ve read in a long time, The World is Flat, provides a vivid understanding about the changes that have happened to the world in the last decade. In many ways, The World is Flat provides a starting point for some of the other books on this list. The first section entitled “Ten Flatteners that Changed the World” goes into detail about some of the world-changing moments that have put human history on our current path.

2. Good to Great – Jim Collins

Good to Great is a fantastically researched book that exposes what good companies who became great companies have in common. It is a follow up to the best seller “Built to Last” that brought us great concepts such as the BHAG – Big Harry Audacious Goals. Good to Great is a powerful book for both business and personal growth. Valuable concepts include the Fifth Generation Leader and the Hedgehog Concept.

3. 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen Covey

In his classic book on personal development Stephen Covey shares what makes people highly effective. This book has become the standard in the field of personal growth. Concepts such as Be Proactive, Think Win-Win, and Seek First to Understand are principles that Covey illustrates throughout his book. My favorite section is called First Things First, which spawned its own book that has also been important for me.

4. How to Win Friends and Influence People – Dale Carnegie

Another classic in the personal development field, How to Win Friends and Influence People is a powerful book. The interesting thing is how basic the principles within the book are. They are obvious and yet profound at the same time. And while we may innately know that all of the tips in this book are good for our relationships, so often we don’t do them. Ideals such as “smile”, “become genuinely interested in other people”, “be a good listener” and “think in terms of the other man’s interest” are explained. Because so many of the principles are basic to life, this book serves as a powerful reminder too, helping us each to build more friendships and influence others.

5. Purple Cow – by Seth Godin

This short little book from marketing guru Seth Godin, is all about being remarkable. Godin explains how if you are driving through a rural area and notice the cows they will eventually all look the same – one cow looks very much like the next cow. If however, there was a purple cow it would catch your attention. The purple cow would be remarkable, and you would stop to see it, take photos of it, and tell others about it. Godin argues that your product or service needs to be remarkable. It can’t be the same as every other product; your product must become a purple cow.

6. The 4-Hour Work-Week – Tim Ferriss

No book in recent history has created as much excitement and even controversy as Ferriss’ 4-Hour Work-Week. Ferriss’ book is about a new lifestyle concept, one with less work, more time to focus on other life goals. For me, the most important part of the book are Ferriss’ concepts of productivity. He believes and teaches how most of us can accomplish far more each day if we eliminate the things that interrupt us, batch our communication tasks, and outsource more of our lives. While, I think Ferriss under values work, I recommend this book to many people for the productivity differences it can help with.

7. Rich Dad Poor Dad – Robert Kiyosaki

In this important book, Kiyosaki teaches financial principles through the stories of his two “dads”, one who had money and one who didn’t. He argues that the rich and poor think about money very differently and as such, teach their kids very different things about money. This book is very effective because it is presented as a narrative rather than a list of facts and ideas.

8. The Total Money Makeover – Dave Ramsey

Dave Ramsey the radio financial guru offers wonderful advice for people on how to become debt free and improve their financial future. The book offers a simple process, following what Dave calls “baby steps”. Each step builds on the previous steps and helps you move towards total financial freedom – being debt free. The value of this book lies in its simplicity and its ability to help anyone make progress towards freedom from debt.

9. 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership – John Maxwell

In this book one of the world’s top leadership experts, John Maxwell, breaks down leadership into 21 laws. Each law is based around a memorable story to illustrate the point. Leadership laws include the “Law of the Lid”, the “Law of Navigation”, and the “Law of Respect”. Each law provides valuable leadership lessons on its own, and when put together provides a complete treatise on leadership.

10. Renovations of the Heart – Dallas Willard

This is the most important book I have read on spiritual growth. Willard calls people to fall of the life of Christ and to take on Christ-like character for ourselves. The book calls people to a transformation that can take place in people through our spirit. If you long to follow the historical Jesus, not necessarily what today we call “Christianity”, this book will be of interest to you.

Well those are my top 10 choices. Currently, I’m reading Getting Things Done by David Allen, and it may easily crack this top 10 list. The only problem is, I’m not sure which one it should replace.

Your turn:

What are some of your top book choices? What are you reading currently? Do you have any feedback on any of my selections?

The Success Professor – Danny Gamache

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Developing a Reading Plan

Last week I wrote about 6 Steps to Grow Daily, and one of the points is to read. A great way to ensure reading is to have a reading plan.

As a professor, I read a lot. Reading is a part of my job. Each year, I need to submit to my boss a reading plan of books that I intend on reading during the course of the year along with a list of books completed over the past year. This is considered a part of my professional development.

Do you have a reading plan for your personal growth? If not start one today. You can make a list for an entire year or for the rest of this calendar year. Our reading plan does not follow the calendar year, but rather the school year. I set my reading plan each year in May and work through it from June to the following May.

How to Set up Your Reading Plan

1. Determine How Many Books You Plan on Reading

The starting point for any reading plan is to know how many books you intend on reading during the course of the next year. Be sure to set a realistic goal, but one that will force you to stretch a little bit. In other words, you should at least have to remember its your goal and take active steps towards completing it.

The first couple of years that I submitted reading plans I was overly ambitious. I would list about 40 books, figuring I could complete one almost every week. For me, this was simply unrealistic. Instead most years I completed about 20 books. That helped me to set my goal of 24 books a year.

It is not important whether you are able to read 10 books, 20 books, or 50 books. What is important is that you take steps towards personal growth by reading and completing your goal.

2. Determine the Categories of Books You Want to Read

Your reading plan should have books from a variety of different categories. This helps you to ensure that you are reading and growing in a wide number of areas. Your list of categories will naturally be different depending on your position. I use the following categories:

• General Personal Growth & Productivity
• Leadership
• Money & Finance
• General Business
• Spiritual Growth
• Fun

3. Brainstorm Books You May Want to Read

In this step, you simply want to list books that you may be interested in reading. Start this step by looking through books you own already but have not read. If you are like me you have a lot of books that you have yet to read. These naturally go on your list.

You can also add to your list by checking out the best sellers at Amazon ( Amazon Business Best Sellers ) or other book stores. You also can add any books to your list that you have been interested in reading, but haven’t gotten to yet.

Finally, you can add books to your list based on recommendations from your friends, bloggers you trust, or others. This can be a fantastic way of learning about important books that can be valuable for your life and business.

4. Pick the Most Important Books to Read from Your List

Here you want to start sifting through your brainstorm list and picking the most important ones for you to read. Your goal is to end up with a list that is equal to about 75% of the total number of books you want to read during the upcoming year (or remainder of the year).

For example, with my goal of reading 24 books in a year, I am to pick only 18 books to put in my reading plan. Why not 24? It is important for you to leave yourself some flexibility to add new books to your list throughout your year. This helps you so that you don’t feel tied down to only reading from your list. If a new exciting book comes out that is important for you to read, go ahead.

5. Record your Completed Reading

Once you have the plan in place you can start a list of all of the books you have completed. I keep my list in an Excel document. Every time I complete a book I record the name of the book and author in my Excel document. I do not start a new one each year, rather I continue to use the same spreadsheet, so I can see quickly all of the books I have read since I started the list.

6. Keep track of Other Books to Read

Throughout the year you will naturally hear about new books that you would like to read. You need to develop a system to keep track of books that you are interested in reading. I keep a Word document on my desktop filled with potential reading ideas. Every time that I come across a book I’d like to read I just copy and paste the name and author, or even the Amazon URL straight into my Word document. This way each year I can review the list as part of my brainstorming in step three.

It is important that you start reading today. Pick a book you are excited about reading and get started. Later in the week I’ll share some of my favorite books from each of my categories.

The Success Professor – Danny Gamache

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