If you’re considering making some changes towards personal development, this article can help you take those first steps. Evaluating your current position in life will make it significantly easier to make a clear path to your goals. The following tips were designed to help people assess what tangible goals might look like for them.

In order to improve your personal development performance, look for goals you have been putting off and get to work on them. Ambitious goals and multiple goals are good things – unless you tend to leave some of them unattended. Make a plan that moves you towards your problem goals, at least a little bit every day.

Try using affirmations to make yourself see how great you really are. Repeating phrases like “I am strong,””I believe in myself,” “I am healthy,” etc. can really help you feel better about the kind of person you feel you are. It really helps increase your self-worth and personal strength to achieve your goals.

Remove artificially-sweetened products with aspartame from your diet. Aspartame, contained in Equal and NutraSweet, is responsible for blocking serotonin formation, causing insomnia, headaches, and blue moods in people who already have some serotonin depletion. For a natural sweetener that does not affect serotonin, blood sugar or calorie levels, try stevia.

Going through a strength finder assessment is one of the best ways to get a grasp on how well you understand your strengths and areas of weakness. This kind of assessment will provide you with your top five strengths, which you can then incorporate into your daily life and apply to both your personal and professional life.

Learn to recognize your negative thinking patterns — then reroute them to a more positive or realistic mindset. Do this with the help of a simple daily log, or work with a therapist to learn cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT has been proven to help people change their automtatic negative thinking into a more positive, realistic thought process.

Pinpoint your personal values when you are crafting a personal development plan. If you go against your values, you are shooting yourself in the foot. Instead, spend your time and energy on areas in your life you wish to develop that also synchronize with your personal values. This allows you to implement personal and professional changes that will last forever.

Identify your current strengths before you try to change your perceived weaknesses. A key component of personal development is having a true understanding of your whole self. Unfortunately, personal development often focuses only on weaknesses. Often, improving an already developed strength may be more helpful to achieving your long-term goals.

To give yourself a fresh perspective expose yourself to new ideas and new experiences. Experiencing new things, even in an unrelated field, will make you look at things in a completely different way. This can jump-start your creative juices and the new perspective may help you find new solutions to old problems.

As you can see, personal development requires a customized approach. Your path to personal development will only succeed if you respect your own worldview. By utilizing the above tips and staying true to your personal character, you can take the first steps to creating better habits and building a stronger you1