Best gift for yourself
PEOPLE often confuse giving to the point they forget that the first person they should give to is themselves. As the saying goes, you cannot give out of an empty cup. And in a season where giving is better than receiving, people often get lost in the social obligations to give gifts when they should first be refilling their empty cups.
As we begin another year, I hope you can take the time to evaluate how much you have given yourself the past year in terms of investing in your personal and professional growth. I have always believed that the best gift you can give yourself is to grow by investing in your own development because the better you are at what you do, the more people will appreciate you and help you achieve your goals. This year, give yourself the gift of a better you.
Start by identifying what you really want to accomplish next year and identifying the milestones that will indicate if you are near to achieving your goals. Most people plan and just look at their goals as the end all and be all. By identifying milestones, you can pace yourself and redirect efforts when a milestone becomes difficult to achieve. Life goals are rarely done in a straight line. By identifying milestones, you can easily avoid pitfalls and blockages by taking one step at a time. One goal you might like to learn is saying “no” more often. You need to evaluate what you have done for others the past year that have contributed to your own professional development and self-fulfillment. If you do more work for others than you do for yourself, you need to take back the time for yourself by saying “no” more often. That time could have been spent saying “yes” to activities that you enjoy doing, or activities that will help you improve the way you do your work.
Another goal you might like to achieve is adopting an attitude of gratitude. Be thankful for what you have and be content with what has been given to you. Much of the frustrations in your personal and professional life come from not being content with what you have, demanding to be given more than what you really need, or even comparing yourself to what others have. There is nothing wrong with wanting to become better and striving to be comfortable. But when others become the yardstick to measure your own happiness, you will perpetually be wanting more because there will always be someone better than you. If you want to have more, make sure that you want it for yourself and not because others have it.
To guide you in pursuing the best version of yourself, find someone who can mentor you. A mentor is someone who can help you improve an aspect of your life. This means you can have a mentor for your career development and another mentor for your personal life. This will depend on what you want to accomplish within a time frame and your personal life goals. You can find a mentor within your own circle, but you can also choose someone who is an expert in another field. The goal is to find someone who is willing to take the time to teach you and show you how they succeeded.
To help you become aware of your own biases and the way you think, write down your reflections in a journal so you can notice patterns. One of the best tools for self-evaluation are your written thoughts because they help you see yourself from a third person perspective. It also allows you to understand how you reacted during certain times in your life and evaluate what made you think and act that way. Most of all, it will help you analyze how you react to certain situations and what triggered you to react the way you did. By knowing these, you can plan how you react the next time a similar situation happens.
Investing in yourself is actually your gift to others. By being a better person, you bring more joy and laughter to others. At work, when you improve the way you do your tasks and help others when they need it, you help create an environment where work becomes enjoyable and people look forward to working with you. At the very least, when you do your work as you are supposed to and you work professionally with others, you make it easier for others to do their work. By improving the way you do your tasks, people will appreciate you more and come to your aid when you need them.
You might also want to develop your network by reaching out to others and getting to know more people in the organization. I know of people who have worked in the same company for decades and yet do not know one single person from a different department. There are cases when someone’s role has limited interdepartmental interaction but this should not stop you from getting to know others from another team. Take the time to interact with others and get to know someone from another part of your organization. You might just be surprised what they can teach you about yourself and the management.
Now is also the best time to organize and declutter. If there is one thing you can do for yourself, it is to organize your work desk and throw away things that you do not need. I have always made it a point to leave the top of my desk clean before every weekend. This helps me know which are the common things I need every day and keep those that I use occasionally. By keeping your desk clean and clutter-free, you have more space to do your tasks for the day.
To know how much you have invested yourself, make a list of what you want to accomplish next year and tick them off after completing them. And at the end of the year, reward yourself as a reminder of how much you have gained for the year and as an added motivation to keep getting better.
The best gift you can give yourself is to become the best version of yourself. To do this, you need to set aside time, effort and resources so you can focus on what matters the most. When you value yourself enough to invest in your own improvement, you will draw others who will take the time, effort and resources to also invest in you.