Personal Development
Personal Development
Everyone wishes to be successful in college, their careers and personal life. I started at DeVry with the intention of doing well in my classes, learning essential skills and information, completing my program, and attaining appropriate employment. These are the goals I seek to attain in the long-run. To achieve those goals, I need to make positive changes to my habits, attitudes and learning skills among others. My personal development influences my intellectual development. In COLL148, I completed numerous self-assessments, examined my prior experiences, consulted with others, and considered my own future. As a result, I have identified the following areas in which I would like to make positive changes to promote my personal success.
First, I would like to address my lack of concentration in class. I have realized that I have a relatively limited attention span when it comes to paying attention in classes that are conducted without any illustrations; literally as well as by way of analogy. Second, I get easily frustrated when I am unable to communicate effectively with people. This often happens when I am speaking to people who have poor skills in English thus making it difficult for them to respond to my queries or communicate their own ideas. Third, I fear that I may be too docile or to put it bluntly, ‘a doormat’. Whenever, I have a problem with someone or with something that someone did, I keep quiet about it and let the wrong remain unaddressed. I am unable to stand up for myself. Finally, I find it difficult to execute vague directions or process unclear information. When this happens, I almost certainly fail to complete the task I set out to do and this leaves me frustrated.
SMART goals and challenges
In order to improve on these success skills areas I have formulated SMART goals with regard to each skill area. My first concern is my inability to concentrate during classes that are mainly conducted by way of lectures. I will improve on this by reading on the topics scheduled for the class beforehand in order to contextualize the information that the lecturer is giving. This way, I would have no need for illustrations or analogies. Further, I can draw illustrations of my own as the lecturer speaks. This would mean that for each of my ‘boring’ classes I would have a set of notes complete with illustrations that would be very interesting to read later on. My tight class schedule may make it difficult to squeeze in further reading time but I can address this by cutting down on time I waste in other areas.
Second, I need to address my lack of patience when it comes to communicating with persons who are not fluent in English. I will address this by developing more patience. Practically, I am going to purpose to speak slowly and clearly, without any ambiguity, for people to understand me. Further I will help anyone who cannot speak fluent English try and develop their ideas as they speak to me. I will ensure that after every ‘conversation’ the person I am speaking to has learnt a thing or two about developing and communicating their ideas. I will also spend half an hour each day learning a foreign language in order to bridge the communication barrier with persons who may not be able to communicate effectively in English. Learning one or two more foreign languages may be difficult for me but I can achieve this by learning informally through interaction with my multi-lingual friends.
Third, I need to improve on my reluctance to stand up for myself. I think this stems from lack of confidence and perhaps a little fear that I may still not get what I want even if I do stand up for myself. I will boost my self-esteem by interacting with at least one new person each day. This will help address my rather shy nature as well as increase my self-confidence. At the end of each day, I will review any grievances that I may have had during the day and note the people I hold responsible for the wrongs committed. On the very next day, I will let them know that their past actions had offended. This goal appears to be retrospective in the sense that it addresses the problem after time has already lapsed. However, this goal will help build my confidence such that with time I will be able to stand up for myself immediately something goes wrong.
Finally, I need to address my predisposition to frustration when I find information or instructions that are ambiguous and that can thus affect how I complete my work. In order to do this, I will always seek clarification from the source of the information. In the event that the first step does not work, I will appreciate the fact that even ambiguous information has a limited number of ways in which the information can be understood and that the understanding that is most closely related to the task at hand is probably the correct one. Finally, I will take five minutes each day to reflect upon any task I did not accomplish as well as I would have hoped because I did not have accurate information. This will help discover any mistakes in interpretation that I may have made and thus facilitate the avoidance of such mistakes in future.
References
Erwin, T. D. (2012). Intellectual College Development Related to Alumni Perceptions of Personal Growth . Research & Practice in Assessment, 41-49.
