The 6 Pillars of Personal Development

Welcome to Expand Your Life Podcast. This is Jc Jones and you’re listening episode 44.

Welcome back everyone. I hope you’re doing well.

This week we’re going to talk about the 6 Pillars of Personal Development. These are the 6 things or the 6 steps that will get you from point A to point B in any area of your life. Point A being where you’re at now. And point B being where you want to be. I call these the 6 Pillars of Personal Development.

And if you would like a printout of the 6 Pillars Roadmap, you can find it on the website at expandyourlifepodcast.com. Or you can check out the show notes for this episode at expandyourlifepodcast.com/44, and you can download a copy there.

So today we’re going to go over these 6 pillars. Today is just a broad overview of each of these pillars. The next few weeks, we’ll go over each pillar individually and go a little bit more in depth into each one. So get your pen and paper out. Take lots of good notes. Let’s get going.

Pillar #1 is self awareness. I think to sum up self-awareness in just a few words. I could say self-awareness asks questions and looks for answers. It’s how you assess where you’re at now versus where you want to be. It questions the reasons behind the scenes, the reason you do the things you do, think the things that you think, want the things that you want, believe the things that you believe, take the actions you take or why you don’t take any action at all. Basically it asks the who, why, where and how about every area of your life and about you.

Pillar #2 is identity. Who are you? Why are you here? What is your purpose? Identity encompasses what makes you, you. What are your values? What character traits do you have? What are you known for? Those are all questions that are self awareness questions around identity.

On the flip side of those questions, you can ask yourself what values do I want to have? What character traits do I want to cultivate? What do I want to be known for?

It’s real easy to lose a sense of who you are, whether it’s through relationships or just never learning how to figure out who you are or taking the time to discover that. It’s not something that we’re taught in school. Oh yeah. What values do you want to have for your life, for yourself and for your behavior? I’m pretty sure I never heard that question in school.

So with the second pillar being identity, it’s also about how to, to not just find that identity, but how to create boundaries around it. So that you don’t lose a sense of self because of circumstances or how you live your life or the people around you. Creating boundaries around keeping that sense of self secure. So no matter what happens you are, you, you don’t give that up.

Pillar #3 is mindset. This is discovering that the thoughts that you think create all of the results that you have in your life. If you have a result in your life that you don’t want, it can always be traced back to a thought. Self-awareness asks the questions, what thoughts are creating the results that I have in my life right now that I don’t want? And what thoughts will move me toward the results I do want?

Pillar #4 is vision and purpose. What vision do you have for your life? What do you want to be? What do you want to do? What do you want to have? What do you want to feel? Those are all good self-awareness questions to ask, to discover a vision for your life. Of what you want it to look like and feel like, and be like.

Personal development is really pointless if you think about it without some sort of vision. Something that you’re working toward. Something that you’re learning and growing toward. So having a vision of what you want that to be is very important.

Many times when you start creating and becoming aware of the vision you want for your life, that’s when you tend to discover what your purpose is. Your purpose in life. Some people believe that they’re born with a specific purpose that they’re supposed to uncover or find, and it causes them a lot of stress and a lot of overwhelmed feelings because they can’t seem to figure out what their purpose in life really is. I personally felt this way for many years and it wasn’t until I let go of all of that, that I realized finding your purpose is so much simpler than that. We always seem to make things more difficult than they really need to be.

How I think about purpose now is, I believe that it’s something that you discover through working through some of these pillars. It’s not something that you have to chase after, but it will always find you. And while your vision is your motivation, your purpose is your why. It’s the driving force that gets your butt off the couch and gets you moving.

I think the best way to summarize purpose is a quote that I heard of by Picasso. He said, “The meaning of life is to find your gift, and the purpose of life is to give it away.” So purpose comes from giving. Purpose comes from doing for others, for creating something in order to change something in someone else’s life. I.

t can be something as simple as being a great mother. If your sole purpose in life is to be a great mother. That’s extraordinary. Some people find a purpose, very young and work towards fulfilling that purpose, their whole lives. Some people find different purposes throughout their life, depending on the time of life they’re living. If your purpose is to be a great mother, that never ends. But perhaps when your children are older, you end up discovering a second purpose. Some people don’t find a purpose or their purpose until they’re much older and that’s okay too. You’ll always find your purpose when you need it. If you look.

Some people ignore their purpose when it’s revealed to them. Some people don’t want to know. So they stick their head in the sand and ignore it. The gentle nudges, “Hey, I’m here. I’m your purpose. What are you going to do with me?”

Oh, that’s too much work. It’s too hard. I can’t do it. You know, our limiting thoughts and limiting beliefs many times will keep us from our purpose. Also, many times we know what our purpose is but we’ve been limiting ourselves for so many years, with our thoughts and our beliefs that we don’t ever follow it. So vision and purpose are the 4th pillar.

And the 5th pillar is, creating a plan. This is the plan of action. This is how you get to your goal. This is how you attain your vision of what you want your life to look and feel like. I highly recommend only setting goals that lead you toward your vision or your purpose. I really think that setting goals that have nothing to do with your vision is really a waste of time. It took me a lot of years to figure this out for some reason. So learn from my mistakes. Don’t waste years, setting unimportant goals just to set and achieve goals. Make sure that your goals lead toward your vision.

But this pillar, isn’t just about setting goals at the beginning of the year, and forgetting about them. This pillar is setting goals that lead you toward your vision, creating a plan on achieving those goals. Without a plan. You don’t know the steps that you need to take in order to achieve your goal. So this pillar includes figuring out all of the steps you need to take in order to reach your goal. This is creating an action plan. This is creating each step necessary to take.

This makes attaining or achieving your goals much less overwhelming. It takes the overwhelm completely out of it. It helps to give you clarity. It gives you small steps that you can work on daily so that you don’t forget about your goals or forget about your vision. It’s something that is a daily focus that keeps you moving forward. And each of these small steps that you take daily incrementally, they will build upon themselves until you’ve achieved great things.

It’s not about how big the goal is or extraordinary the goal is. If you have the steps in place to achieve that goal and you’re taking the steps each day towards that goal, you will attain that goal. So this is very important to make sure that you don’t just set goals at the beginning of the year and then a few months down the road, “Oh yeah. I set goals.” So pillar #5. Creating a plan.

Now we’re on the last pillar. Pillar #6. And something I’d like to point out about this particular pillar and pillar #1, which was self-awareness. Both of these pillars are probably the ones that you will use the most. These are the pillars that you use while working on every other pillar. Self-awareness like we talked about earlier is asking questions of each of the pillars that come behind it and asks questions about your identity, your mindset, your vision, your purpose, creating your plan and the sixth pillar taking action.

Self-awareness is the question asker of all the other pillars that come behind it just like taking action, which is Pillar #6, moves every other pillar before it forward. Without taking action, you don’t become self aware. Without taking some sort of action, you don’t find out your limitations with your thoughts and your results. Without taking action, you don’t even take the time to figure out your vision or your purpose. Without taking action, you can’t be bothered to create a plan for your goals.

And taking action can also be taken on itself. Taking action on taking action. What this means is that you have to actively do something in order to move forward, grow or learn. You can’t stand still and continue to move forward. I personally don’t believe that anyone stands still. I think you’re either progressing and moving forward or regressing and moving backward.

Taking action includes making each of these pillars a priority, making your life a priority, scheduling it, planning it, keeping your focus on it daily, taking some sort of action daily to make this a part of who you are and a part of your life.

If it’s a priority for you, you will be more focused on it. If you take action on it daily and create a habit around it, it becomes a part of who you are. If you make it important, it will be important. And now I’m going to give you a little bit of a bonus pillar to think about.

The Bonus Pillar is enjoying the journey. This journey of personal development can be very exciting, very rewarding. To truly love your life while you’re on this journey. And live it. Don’t wait until you’ve reached some point to really love your life and to love where you’re at to be satisfied, to be happy. The more you work through these pillars, the more satisfied you’ll find yourself becoming. The more you realize that this moment is great, enjoy it. Don’t wait. Don’t wait to enjoy your life, or you’ll always be waiting.

Well, that’s it for today. As I said at the beginning of the podcast, the next few weeks I’ll go more in-depth on each one of these pillars, I’ll be sharing with you some more information on each of these pillars. Go more in depth and give you ideas of how you can apply them to your life. Things that you can do, exercises that you can do to incorporate them into your life. So make sure you check back throughout the next few weeks for those.

And don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast so that you’ll get updates and notifications when new episodes are released, have a great week.

Bye for now.