When you change, your results change

Working on yourself is the process of achieving and expanding your full potential. Jim Rohn said it well: “Success is what you attract by the person you become.”

The question is, what are you becoming year in year out? Are you better off this year than you were last year? What have you done with your challenges, setbacks, and roadblocks to success and advancement? Working on yourself is about intentional and strategic investment in yourself, so that you can manage yourself effectively regardless of what life might bring your way. Working on yourself allows you to be proactive as opposed to waiting for good things to happen. Abraham Lincoln said it well: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” You may now and then miss the mark, but you will experience a richer and more rewarding life when you commit to continue working on yourself. Making the commitment to continuously work on you is the first step on the path to personal fulfillment.

Investing in yourself is the best investment you will ever make. There are no guarantees in life except for the value you personally bring to the marketplace. Years ago we used to speak about job security. By now you know that there is no such thing. The only semblance of security you have is the value you bring to a given situation and to your organization. Remember this for the rest of your life – THERE IS NO JOB SECURITY! Your only security is your continuous investment in yourself in order to be valuable to the marketplace. You are not paid for what you know but for the value you bring. 

Go to work on yourself

To increase your value in the marketplace, you have to continuously develop yourself. When you go to work on yourself, a few years from now you will begin to question your beliefs, your ways of thinking, your philosophy, the way you speak, and your worldview. Remember, it works all the time; when you change, things change for you! You also take you with you everywhere you go and therefore you can choose to show up the right way. Aldous Huxley speaks to personal development in the following words: “There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.” The true meaning of this quote is that if it is to be, it is up to you! Working on you holds the key to shaping yourself into the person you imagine. When you work on you, your results are bound to change. I started the practice of investing in me years ago without really knowing the full implications of that. I had a voracious appetite for reading great motivational and inspirational books. I also got into researching and reading on subjects of interest to support the work I do. When I started making money, I developed the habit of spending ten percent of my monthly income on developing me. To remain current and relevant to the marketplace, I spent thousands of dollars last year on coaching, workshops, and other resources. I look on these as investments, and they have paid off significantly…big time, to be precise. Had I not invested in myself, I would still be languishing in the land of the poor and in the backwaters of blame and excuses. 
Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself – George Bernard Shaw

You can never go wrong when you go to work on yourself. Some spend lots of money on personal grooming; what they wear and how they look. Why look a certain way on the outside and be hollow on the inside, without depth? So what is the true meaning of working on you? Working on you will bring clarity to your life and help shape your personal philosophy, attitude, and lifestyle. It will help create direction in your life and thereby focus your energy on what is most important to you, rather than on where the wind is blowing. Working on you also builds your confidence, enlarges your worldview, engages your imagination to do great things, and positions you to be ready for what life might throw at you. Investing in you also helps you to stretch to do more and be more. It inspires you to action and stops the bleeding of inaction. It also energizes you to think beyond yourself, and put your focus on what services you might provide. It causes you to be more resilient in the face of change and transformation and generally will serve you well. Show me a person without results and I will point the culprit out to be a lack of personal investment in the self.

​Working on you also reveals whom you should be hanging with. You cannot fly like an eagle and continue to scratch with the chicken. It does not work that way. Working on you will help you take advantage of what Ralph Emerson described so succinctly: “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”