PersDev.com - Neal's Personal Development

New Year’s is a time to reflect upon your achievements and failures over the last year, and set goals and progress towards what you want to become over the next year. Most people I know, myself sometimes included, tend to make New Year’s resolutions, and end up breaking those resolutions before February 1st.

However, I’ve learned a ton about personal development over the last year, and I feel that I may have the key to having a successful New Year’s resolution.
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During the holiday season, generosity and love abound. Whether it’s people being a bit more friendly, or donating money to charity, it makes the holidays joyful and happy. I encourage you to become more friendly and help others by performing community service.

For a long time, I was resistant to community service. Growing up in the LDS church, I was coerced into performing acts of service against my desires. These service activities were often to help miserable people who were ungrateful for our help. For instance, I remember helping clean up an estate of a former junk-horder, and the trustee didn’t even bother to show up. Although this service was helpful, as a youth I didn’t find any tangible benefits for waking up several hours earlier than I was used to in order to perform hard labor for several hours to someone who was ungrateful.
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Intentions are a powerful tool that form a foundation of many of the accomplishments that you will achieve throughout your life. When exploring a new concept, I find that it’s always helpful to consult a dictionary to solidify the meaning of the concept. According to Merriam-Webster, Intention is “a determination to act in a certain way.” My definition of intention is deciding to change your position in reality. I believe that through using intentions, you can improve your life.
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A pattern I’ve noticed recently is that the happiest people I see disregard the aspect of trying to be normal. Many times these individuals dress differently, talk about unpopular subjects, act from their morals, disregard social pressure, and are usually successful.

Instead of trying to live up to your perception of what the world views as “normal,” I challenge you to embrace your weirdness.
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Short post this week and the next couple of weeks, it’s crunch time at school.

In my experience, it’s been pretty clear on what I need to improve on next. You can usually tell what you’re lacking on skill-wise, and you should chip away at that. For instance, I’ve been getting a bit overwhelmed lately because of school, but I realize that I’m not using my time as effectively as I should. Therefore, I should work on time management and productivity.

However, sometimes you don’t always realize what you can do now that will develop yourself as well as potentially ease the difficulty of some of the other tasks that you are working on.

For instance, lets say that you’re having a hard time finding a date. You may realize that you’re shy, and that you really need to talk to more people, but you’re having a hard time creating meaningful conversations. Something that may help this that you haven’t realized is learning how to speak publicly. By boosting your public speaking stat, you also boost your creating relationships stat.

Here are some of the habits that you can form that can help you grow as an individual:
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