Last updated on December 10th, 2022
Improving yourself every day has become the necessary thing in this fastest-growing world where changes are happening very fast. Whether it be your workplace or your personal life, if you don’t update your skills and yourself up to date, you can never set yourself apart from the crowd. So, you need to improve & upgrade yourself constantly to make your personal & professional life successful.
Keep in mind, no one is born perfect or neither should you intend to run after achieving perfection. But you should always be curious about knowing new things. Accept yourself as you are but always try to be a better person. Never hesitate to accept your flaws, but never miss a chance to grow yourself either.
And learning new skills doesn’t translate to be excel in all of them. Be a master of one trade and jack of few which interest you. It will lead you to bring a great improvement in you.
Here are 11 tried and the most effective ways which might be helpful in your growth journey. Some do not need bigger efforts to engage in. Some of them are simple steps that you can act on immediately:
1. Widen the scope of your knowledge
There are several ways to improve your intelligence and expand the scope of your knowledge.
a) Read books – that interest you. A book is the collection of experiences of a writer. Don’t just read them, critically analyze them and learn from their experiences.
b) Read good blogs – A blog can be in any niche. For example, technology, self-help, motivation, poetry or science. It will help you keep yourself updated.
c) Read the newspaper daily – Don’t worry, if you don’t have time to read it. You are living in a digital age, you can install the app of your favourite newspaper. You can read headlines through the app notifications.
d) Make a habit to read the editorial column of a newspaper – An editorial piece is written by researchers, policymakers, historians and Supreme Court lawyers. You would get excellent information in 5-10 min reads which is equal to the years of study and experience. You can not get this sort of rich presentation and knowledge anywhere else so easily. And, it would increase your vocab as well.
e) Watch good movies – They help you face your fears, give tremendous knowledge, and relax your mood. Don’t just watch them, analyze the story later.
f) Read the literature – Reading great literature helps you make better decisions in life. I do the same when I find myself in a dilemma. I try to put myself in the place of someone I would appreciate for her decisions later. Thus I find the solutions for my problems. In a practical sense, it teaches you to deal with the complications of life in creative ways.
2. Improve your practical intelligence
Practical intelligence refers to your ‘common sense or your ability to come up with the solutions for your day to day problems using the knowledge that you already know.
Practical knowledge is more important than theoretical knowledge. The higher your practical intelligence is, the smarter & faster you can solve your problems.
If you want to improve yourself, you must sharpen your practical intelligence. These are a handful of ways that would help you improve your practical knowledge:
a) Learn new skills – Learning empowers you, stimulates your brain cells and makes you a creative person. For example, if you learn dancing, you will learn 10 more ways to improve your flexibility and coordination. You will also aid your weight loss efforts & increase aerobic fitness.
b) Solve riddles – It is the best mental exercise. Solving a riddle means finding ways to get out of a problem. Your mind gets active and comes up with a series of solutions. And that’s how life goes on. You encounter an unpleasant hard situation and you have to find your ways to extricate yourself from it.
c) Play games – Playing games teaches you how not to accept your defeat even after losing it over and over. Games develop a fighting spirit in you and an ability to multi-task which boosts your production skills.
d) Write your thoughts on paper – Writing enhances the creative skills in you. It pushes your brain to connect the dots of different incidents and shape them in a proper writing format. You learn how to put up your thoughts wisely.
3. Keep your skills up to date
Keeping yourself updated with advanced innovations and the latest technology developments in a fast-paced, online world keeps you one step ahead of your competition at your workplace.
We are living in an era where digital science is growing fast and coming up with new technologies every other day. If you don’t keep your skills up to date, you will be left behind in the competition. It will be more difficult to set yourself apart from the crowd.
You will lose many opportunities and control over your job. In the business world, you might end up losing your clients & in your job, you may lose your job & promotions.
These are a few ways you can keep yourself forward in the race:
- Join professional development courses or take online training classes.
- Utilize the power of the internet. Join online educational resources, attend experts webinars and subscribe to related blogs. Bookmark and read the informational articles.
- Use business platform LinkedIn to connect with high-class professionals. Join the community of like-minded people.
- Harness the power of social media to get yourself aware of the latest trends.
4. Improve Yourself by doing SWOT analysis of life
Swot is an acronym for strength, weakness, opportunity, and threats. It is analyzing what helps and what needs to be improved in an organization.
By doing a SWOT analysis of life, you can know what empowers you, and where you need to improve yourself.
You would know your strengths and weakness. You will identify your possibilities and find ways to face fear and avoid external threats.
This is an example of SWOT:
Strengths
Q) Which areas do I excel in?
A) Persistence, passion, patience, commitment.
Q) What skills do I have to achieve my goal?
A) Working under pressure, learning new things, not afraid of taking risks.
Q) What achievements am I most proud of?
A) I started my business despite a lot of fear of failure.
Weakness
Q) Which skills do I need to develop?
A) Networking, social media, SEO & growing email-list
Q) Which goals do I have to achieve?
A) I have to set my business on auto-pilot & grow it exponentially.
Q) What is my negative work habit?
A) Getting distracted with the idea of targetting several things at one time leaves me in deep frustration.
Opportunity
Q) What strategy would help me reach my goals?
A) To target customers in a differentiated & meaningful way & know their pain points.
Q) What would I achieve if I execute my strategy?
A) I would multiply my sales & profit.
Threats
Q) What is holding me back?
A) Being irregular & getting anxious too easily pushes me to a stage of immense disappointment.
Q) What are my fears?
A) What if I lose my audience?
5. Get productive hobbies
The brain is the most important tool of a person’s body. The good news is you can do something to sharpen it, upgrade it and become smarter. The best way to upgrade your brain is by having productive hobbies.
If you are not having productive hobbies, you are wasting a lot of time. Because a hobby is something which you do when you get free out of your work.
Your leisure time activities play an important role to build your personality. If you are using your free time with good hobbies, you are improving yourself even in your free time.
Here are some productive hobbies to help you excel in life:
- Swimming
- Reading a book
- Horse riding
- Joining a Gym
- Yoga to improve brain health
- Listening to music
- Dancing
- Joining activity club
- Listen to podcasts
- Paint a picture
- Mountain hiking
- Etc
6. Improve yourself by seeking out new experiences
There is no need to explain in detail that new experiences improve your creative skills. Here are some simple things you can do in different ways and have new experiences:
- Dine alone at a restaurant
- Shop a different culture dress and go out
- Plan to travel to a different country
- Night outs
- Attend an event you have never before
- Start your business as a side hustle
- Learn to play a musical instrument
- Go to celebrate a festival of different religions people
- Learn a new language
- Try a new game
- Go to visit villages
- Dance in rain
- Go out and gaze waterfall
- Switch off the AC, come out & sleep under the moonlight
- Go moon gazing
- Install live wallpapers of nature
- Sit in the garden and see butterflies
- Feed birds & listen to their chirping
- Paint the wall of your room yourself
- Mingle with people & hear their personal stories
- Spend time with old age people, they may be less or uneducated but you will learn a lot from their experiences
- Etc
Also, read:
43 Fun & Productive Things To Do At Home When Bored
7. Get out of debt more quickly
Get out of all your debts before it goes out of control. Paying off debt frees up your money to do the things you want to do in life. On the other hand, paying on debt builds pressure on your mind. You get stuck with the vicious cycle of debt which leads to content stress and anxiety.
A little stress isn’t harmful but constant stress leads to depression and other serious health issues like migraine, high blood pressure, and heart attack. Also, when you are always stressed, you live with an unnecessary burden on yourself which kills all your creative skills.
In short, debt lowers the quality of life. It is lethal to your physical, emotional and financial health. You can not improve yourself with debt. Therefore, pay off your debts as soon as possible.
Here are some ways to get a pit of debt faster:
- Spend less money
- Earn more money
- Do a part-time job or side hustle
- Pay more
8. Have enough foresight, improve yourself & your plans
Having the right kind of foresight in life helps you to prepare for the worst and make better decisions accordingly. Your foresight saves you from external threats and helps you leverage the opportunities.
Foresight is the ability of humans to look into the future and predict outcomes based on current situations. Foresight is a must for leading a successful and risk-free life. Examples of having the foresight and planning the future are plans for education, health care, housing, city planning, transportation, clean sources of energy, etc
One such example is taking insurance. You looked into the future, planned it and took health and life insurance. This is called smart future planning which is not possible without foresight. Thus, you prepare yourself for the possible outcomes and arrange things to mitigate their effect.
But this future decided behaviour should not influence your present life much rather keep it in a balanced manner. Don’t get trapped into always planning your future. Also, learn to live in the present.
Related: X-ray of your thoughts to make better decisions
9. Improve your mental diet plan
Your mind needs a dose to be positive thoughts daily to stay committed to your goals, to beat negative energy which arises due to the complications of life (source).
And daily means daily, if not daily at least do it periodically. As your physical body needs a daily bath to stay clean, so your mind needs a good and constant mental diet to eliminate negative thoughts and purify itself constantly.
Tell me, Isn’t it a good idea to refill and energize your mind before your hectic life consumes its energy?
Look, you are a social animal and always would be. Being a part of society, you have to deal with different kinds of people daily, be active on social media and encounter unpleasant situations daily.
Well, you don’t hold control over the things that happens to you, but you can find ways to turn those vibes into positive ones.
Therefore, the best way is to improve your mental diet. When your mental condition is good, you can face everything and get your positive energy back.
Therefore, feed your mind the things which are highly productive, positive and meaningful.
These articles will be helping you to improve your mental diet:
- Healthy habits to improve your mental health
- Learn to control your anger
- How to get peace of mind
- Running to reduce stress
- Yoga for mental health & happiness
- Meditation for peace of mind
10. Be loyal to yourself
Being loyal to yourself means knowing yourself, knowing who you are and what you can do. When you are loyal to yourself, you don’t fake your feeling and you remain in your original self.
This helps you make better decisions in life. For example, if you are an introvert and you are ready to make better you are being kind to yourself. Because you would not try to imitate an extrovert that might be exhausting.
You will try to improve yourself by being an introvert. The feeling of being ‘less than others’ would not drain your energy.
Also, when you become generous to yourself, you try to understand others’ feelings. A feeling of generosity changes your heart and purifies your soul. When you honour others’ feelings, your relationships improve with them.
So, do what makes you happy, love yourself, and constantly improve yourself. And this is possible only when you start being loyal to yourself first.
Further reading:
- Say no to yourself & your negative thoughts
- Learn to ignore
- Recognize your self-worth
- Practice self-care because it is not selfish
- Give time to yourself
- 30 Quick Stress Buster Activities (Awaken Your Inner Child)
- Self-acceptance: 11 Ways To Accept Your Reality The Way It Is
11. Challenge yourself
When you are challenging yourself for doing different things or learning new skills or starting a new venture, you are becoming smarter.
Living in your comfort zone is comfortable but it doesn’t grow you. You don’t improve there.
It’s quite boring living in your comfort zone. You will not see miracles. Your comfort zone also hinders your progress in a way that you create a certain kind of fear of losing things in life. You start losing your potential, opportunities and your talent.
The people who dare to break their comfort zone have been found taking the greatest advantage of opportunities. Remember, if nothing challenges you, you are never going to change and grow.
Therefore, If you want to improve yourself, move out of your comfort zone and try everything that you have only been dreaming of all your life.
Further reading:
How to be courageous: be open to courage
The final word: improve yourself
Improving yourself is an essential part to live a quality life, grabbing more opportunities for a better future. You can always improve your intelligence and constantly improve yourself even if you are not born intelligent or vice versa.
Nobody is born with skills, you can always learn new skills and sharpen your brain.
The most effective ways to constantly improve yourself upgrade your brain, seek out new experiences, improve your emotional and practical intelligence and be open to courage.
Follow the path of great people, create your principles and never get afraid of trying out new things.
If you liked the article, please share it with someone you care about and help them improve themselves constantly!
Vibhor Bansal says
“Change” is the only constant thing in this world. To be in line with this constant, updation is very much important.
” Learn, unlearn and relearn” is the new philosophy.
You have written a wonderful blog 🙂
Srishti says
Thanks, Vibhor 🙂
Pooja Mahimkar says
I so agree with all you that you have mentioned. I love to constantly keeping pushing myself to do something new, I guess that is my way of updating myself and my skills. At times of course I fail but I don’t let it affect me much, every one cannot do everything, right?
Srishti says
Yes, right! But never miss a chance to learn something new if you get a chance:) Thanks for stopping by Pooja:)
Ritu says
Loved your post, It is a comprehensive list with great pointers. Self-improvement is imperative or one just stagnates.
Your blog is quite a find and I cannot thank My Friend Alexa enough for it.
Srishti says
Same here Ritu:) I am also very happy to find you through MyFriendAlexa. And thanks for your words, they mean a lot to me:)
Ritu says
Thank you, Srishti 🙂
Srishti says
🙂
Dev Thakkar says
Very nice blog i would definitely implement this in my life and already did one thing now Thats reading good blogs 😊😉
Srishti says
Thanks, Dev 🙂
Urvashi says
I would be lying if I just said its a great post. It’s a guide to everyone who needs direction in life. It all makes sense. Honestly I landed here and was just reading but in just few sentences I knew I am going to be one of your loyal readers.
Srishti says
Wow, Thanks a bunch! Your words mean a lot to me:) I am very happy you like it.
Supriti says
This is a very well researched and a very comprehensive piece. I hope everybody reads this and take away at least one point from it and follow it. I am sure even if they do this, they can change their lives. for me the one key takeaway was keep learning and keep growing. there is no age to learn. my mother my mother in law still keep on trying new recipe, the keep on learning from YouTube and they keep enjoying the life. Keep writing and keep sharing such wonderful information
Srishti says
Thank you so so much for your words. It means a lot to me. And yes, we should never stop learning & growing:)
Rohit Verma says
Excellently written article! I am bookmarking this!
Srishti says
🙂
Kala Ravi says
Really wonderful pointers to improve oneself. You are right about not everyone being of the same intelligence level but it is necessary to keep sharpening existing skills and acquiring new ones. A wonderful post that makes you feel more positive towards life.
Srishti says
Thanks. Glad you liked it:)
Sitharaam Jayakumar says
Wow! That is indeed a very exhaustive post giving valuable tips on how to live life well. I agree with all the points for self improvement you have listed.
Srishti says
Happy, you found it useful.
Pallavi Acharya says
This is indeed very practical and motivational. The small steps can lead to big changes!
Srishti says
Yes!
Sonia Dogra says
Sky is the limit. So keep moving, keep aspiring! A great read!!
Srishti says
Yes! Thanks.
Varsha Nitin says
Every small step we take into consideration counts in the overall self-improvement process. This post was highly inspirational. Loved it to the core 🙂 This makes me remind of an online course which has to be finished soon.
Srishti says
Yes, Varsha True:) ATB for your course!
Manas Mukul says
Wow-what an informative and detailed post. Great self-help on how to improve oneself.
#ContemplationOfaJoker #Jokerophilia
Srishti says
🙂
Narinder Bhatia says
Hi, Nice, comprehensive and well-researched post. You have covered almost all aspects that one should endeavour to improve consistently. If we have to stay relevant in this world, we need to constantly keep improving ourselves through the process of learning, unlearning and relearning
Srishti says
Yes, constant improvement is very important in this fast-pacing world.
alpana says
Sometimes by introducing small changes to our routine leads us to big and positive outcomes. Investing some quality time towards ourself and our life definitely important.
Srishti says
True!
dipika singh says
What a lovely and motivating post this is, indeed very uplifting. We must always work towards self improvement.
Srishti says
Thanks for your kind words 🙂 Yes, we should never stop improving ourselves!
Charu says
Great post! There is always a scope of improving and learning. We should never give up on that.
Srishti says
So happy to hear, you liked it:) Thanks for stopping by!
MeenalSonal says
This is so detailed post about improving one self. I do read books and newspapers and also keep doing online courses that brushes up my knowledge of latest in the field.
Srishti says
That’s great 🙂
Monika says
Wow that was such a detailed and inspiring post . Ofcourse we need to constantly work upon improving ourselves , a step at a time .
Srishti says
Hey, Thank you, Monika:)
Resha Patel says
Great insights! Could be a game changer.
Srishti says
Thanks for reading:)
Mrs. Sunshine says
Those are some great tips and ideas to lead a productive life. Thanks for sharing this.
Srishti says
Thanks
Nilesh Sharma says
Great Post Shrishti, I have been doing the same since the past 4 years and it really worked wonders. Reaping the benefits now. Thank you for writing and sharing this post 🙂
Srishti says
Happy to know that:)
Modern Gypsy says
What a comprehensive list you have here! I agree with most of the points you’ve shared. I’ve been doing a lot of these myself since years and can vouch for effective some of these are.
Srishti says
🙂
Aditi Kapur says
You have very well explained the need to constantly improve oneself. Life stops where we stop evolving.
Srishti says
We should always work on improving ourselves.
Dr.Amrita Basu says
To be a life long learner is the most beautiful way to live.
Srishti says
Thanks for your comment, Dr. Amrita:)
vartika says
This post exudes so much positivity, loved it. You have shared all the pointers so mindfully.
Srishti says
Thanks:)
Tina Sequeira says
Very well-written, Srishti! I enjoyed reading your blog. Amazing tips and I will keep coming back for more .Glad to know you via #MyFriendAlexa.
Srishti says
Same here, Tina:) Thanks much for your kind words. I read your blog. It is amazing. You are doing great work by bringing forward women’s voice.
Manish Gaur says
Its great to have this resource of running blogs in hand. I enjoy & game changer post.
Srishti says
Thanks, keep visiting!