Personal development books are the new rage these days. However, first a distinction must be made between personal development books and personality development books. The latter helps people improve one aspect of their life which is one’s outward appearance which is a combination of behavior and looks. Personal development is a more comprehensive and encompassing area of improvement. It includes personality development but also many other areas of improvement. It involves improving oneself from within in a spiritual, moral, physiological, emotional sense. It stresses on improvement in one’s thinking because that affects every aspect of one’s life. The effects of personal development manifest themselves in many ways especially through personality development.
An avalanche of books
There are many published on personal development in the market. They are written by authors who have varied backgrounds. Some authors specialize in writing these and have dedicated their whole life to them. They have made a career out of writing these kinds of book and are experts. These kinds of reading materials are rich in academic advice and tips because they draw from a rich pool of pre-existing books. These tend to be great religious and holy books, rich epics that have religious connotations or established books in the field of psychology, great literature and travel book. Since the source material is of such high quality these books tend to be very useful for the believers. Their biggest short coming is probably the author’s lack of real life experience. Some critics feel that they represent an ideal which is difficult to attain. Even some readers feel that these reading material are too idealistic.
The second major category of personal improvement book is the ones written by authors who are not full time writers at least to begin with. These authors are often people who specialized in some practical work and at a later stage decided to write personal improvement book. These reading material typically are a healthy mix of the idealistic but tempered with the wisdom of practical experience. They are also deeply colored by the personal experience of the author. There are mixed reactions to this genre. While some readers like the fact that the authors are more grounded in reality and this will percolate down to the book, some find them a curious hybrid that are too niche for everyone’s liking. The influence of the author’s personal experience is also a turn-off for some readers who want to read a book that is neutral in its perceptions.
A little caution is good
The category itself is huge. It is also a very fast growing segment in self help books. Worldwide the desire for self improvement is driving this market resulting in the growth in sales for these books. However readers must exercise caution when deciding which books to buy. Many of these materials are nothing better than scams with authors recycling previously written books. Some of these books are covertly political and that is also very dangerous. Since these can change the thinking of the person they are potentially very dangerous. A badly written book or even a well written personal development book has the innate capacity to ruin a healthy mind.
Watch the video related to personal improvement
This video explains the law of atraction, one of the powers of the mind, and elucidates quantum programming.
Help answer the question about personal improvement
Any good chat room that is good for personal improvement for a skin deep person like me?
I have no knowledge about the operations of chat room
About Author
Stephen C Campbell is a Master NLP Practitioner, personal coach who runs Self Development programs and a free membership site. membershttp://www.you-can-be.com/members
Tags: depression, Development Book, Happiness, happy, help, Improvement, Personal Development, Personal Development Book, Reading Material, self
There is the all time classic that everyone should read. "How to Win Friends and Influence People" Dale Carnegie not only once but over and over.
This is a great video, thanks to people like you we have great videos on Youtube. By the way, there are other methods, I saw a video by a Tibetan Lama tsemtulku, who shares many self-improvement methods like in Tsem Rinpoche getting JEALOUS at Mac!!!!!!, which I find surprisingly modern and related to what you are sharing. Please post more self-help videos like these on Youtube.
Here is some free stuff. I can't vouch for the quality, but the first one is probably the best:
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/12/free-tony-robbins-workbook/
http://starfields.org/easyeft/
http://www.trans4mind.com/
http://www.lds4b.com/Resources/Free+resources/Personal+development/
Good luck!
The link no longer works.
I would say that if you can't see something in person before you buy it, you shouldn't buy it from Craigslist. Because everything is anonymous, there is no protection against scams. If you want to buy something like that, you should use Ebay which has a lot of different mechanisms to protect against scammers.
It's better to live your life than just read about it.
Develop through practise and experience.
what do you mean by personal develupment? thats fairly wide, can you narrow it down a bit?
if you have a problem all your life with this don't expect you to be able to solve it. by reading books you are relying on yourself (the person that all his life could not get it right) to solve this problem. you just can't.
you need to go to a psychologist & get to the root of your procrastinaton & have someone else work with you to get back on track. also, you can hire a professonal organizer to come to your house & show you how to get organiszed & sell all those books cluttering up your home. you can go to franklyn covey & they can show you how to organize your stuff at work by going to a class & having the proper oraganizational tools you will be good to go.
just be done with it already…. take my advise since you asked for it. roll with it & put this behind you before you die all unorganized & cluttered under a pile of tony robbins books.
be serious & knock this out
hope this was helpfull & inspirational
ss
There is a website I would like to introduce you to. The person running it helps to advertise on line jobs, products you can actually afford and also services and opportunities for people such as yourself. There is a website translator available on the site you can click on to so you can go global if you wish and get more traffic to your site, there are also places which do advertise for free, http://www.bizinis.com does it for free if you put there link right on your website, you can also get visitors.
In order to get it running you must ADVERTISE, ADVERTISE, ADVERTISE. Though alot of advertisement places try getting you to pay a fortune, it is hard sometimes to make it if you don't know the right place to look. Next, you also need the proper support system. A network of people. Some networks have thousands upon thousands of people who run their own businesses and websites who are actually willing to lend a free hand, and I do mean FREE. They're not like the people you see out there who say, "I'll tell you my secret of how I made it happen, but for this amount of money." Then it turns out to be bogus. Direct Matches is a really great network to be involved in. I'm involved with them, it is wonderful.
Working on-line at your own thing, especially your own website, does not mean you have to be an absolute computer wiz. There are professionals, newbies, and just your average person. There are all sorts of people out there working the net and their own websites and on-line businesses.
I can give you three links today. The first link is to a wonderful new site that gives you access to some wonderful information on a number of topics. The second link I'll give to you will be to an excellent network which I mentioned before. They give you excellent support. Also on the first site I will mention, there is a link on there to a great company that helps you get your website running, that company also provides you with many other opportunities. You have got to check this stuff out, it's great. The third link I give is also to the company that provides the help I mentioned in starting your website or other things you may wish to start from home. If you already have a website, they will do what they can to help you from there to be successful at it.
- So you think you can think?
- Grow up now or never
- No mountain too high.
- How could you climb up there?
It’s not mandatory to have a graduate degree to be a motivational speaker. For instance, if you possess a magnetic personality or have tremendous charisma like say, Mahatma Gandhi, or Nelson Mandela, people will be drawn to you naturally and find whatever you say motivational.
But it helps to have the theories in mind. The people you want to motivate won’t all have the same experiences as you. They may have questions that they want answered, but you’re stumped because it’s beyond your experiential learning. Your advice needs to be based on knowledge (of theory or practice), or it becomes fanciful.
You don’t need to have a degree to be in the self-help industry. Just start helping people and in time you will be able to make a difference in people’s lives.
I would recommend "Eat that frog" by Brian Tracy. It's very good because of the format – very short tips that can be digested easily and integrated into your life quickly. But don't think that because the tips are short that they are not meaningful. He's just very good at getting the point across in a very concise fashion. Very accessible. And when combined together, they create a very powerful approach to changing your life.
Contrast with Stephen Covey's "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" where it is a complex in depth approach which you have to basically clear an afternoon just to get through one chapter. While very good material, it can be overly complex at times.
Also, stay away from "Who Moved my Cheese". It's trite and condescending. The book is completely useless and a waste of your money.
One book that comes highly recommended is "the Power of Positive Thinking" and carries a good message that I found helpful many, many yrs ago.
I will take your question as applying more to self-help and self-improvement. If this is the case, and it may not be, I suggest, all of which I have read with no particualr favorite, but ALL excellent:
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
This is one of the very first books on human relations. It is also one of the hokiest and most derided titles of any book ever written. Don’t be fooled by it. If you want to be a better person, improve your human relation skills and make people like you, you can’t beat it. There is a reason this book has sold close to 40 million copies since it was first published in the 1930s. Its message and lessons are timeless.
One of the most important lessons you will learn from this book is, ”You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you."
http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/0671027034/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251310074&sr=1-1
Others:
Think and Grow Rich – Napoleon Hill
This book ranks #64 on the right side list at:
http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnonfiction.html
Then you have a couple of other classics in this genre’:
The Power of Positive Thinking by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale
And
As a Man Thinketh – by James Allen
A more recent classic:
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
You can buy books cheaply at Abe Books:
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=Dale+Carnegie&sts=t&tn=how+to+win+friends+and+influence+people&x=48&y=19
Personal development is a hobby that you should have that manifests itself into all of your time. If you don't live by what you read then you're just being introverted inside of books and not expelling or practicing any of it.
I don't think it's good to think you're obsessed with anything because there is a lot of important things you could be doing with your time. It's great to have a hobby and to self better yourself but if all you do is read and imagine things on a page then it sounds like escapism to me rather than reading reality you're simply readings lots of fiction. Fiction because none of it really applies to your life and none of it is existent in your life.
Too much escapism isn't good.
That's normal. You're in a healthy emotional state. Believe me, being a teenager you're moods could be much worse. Honestly, it's impossible to be alive and happy all the time. Happiness and sadness are a part of life, whether or not you chose to truly live. The best you can do is realize that sadness is not eternal, and eventually you'll be back to your "preferable" happy self.
I find that, as long as I keep trying to bring new things into my life I am less likely to become depressed. So keep doing what you're doing.
It wasn't anything I read – it was something my father told me.
He told me "never stop learning!"