Personal Development: A Practical Guide

Nearly every manager and employee is accountable to a supervisor, a director, or even a customer or client. Decisions about tasks, priorities, deadlines, and goals are made by someone else, an external authority who is often called "the boss."
Your external boss holds a position of power. The boss judges whether you've done a good job, whether you'll receive a raise in pay, and whether you'll hear praise or criticism.
However, there's another authority who holds even more power over an employee's work than an external boss. Employees are also accountable to their own values and conscience, their "inner boss."
In this course, you'll explore the meaning of personal accountability and learn how to find your own inner boss. You'll also learn to apply the guidance of your inner boss to practice personal accountability.
Have you ever thought that you could be the best boss you've ever had? By developing attitudes and skills that empower you, you can manage from within and become your own best boss. You already know the person who will lead the way to self-empowerment: it's you!
Self-empowerment is the process of taking responsibility for your attitudes, behaviors, and actions at work to maximize your effectiveness.
This book will discuss strategies for empowering yourself through self-coaching and approaches for developing an entrepreneurial mind-set. It will also provide you with the opportunity to apply a model for self-empowerment to enhance your performance. Applying these tools will help you become a self- empowered contributor in your organization.
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy announced the United States would embark on a program to put an astronaut on the moon. Kennedy said he chose this goal not because it was easy, but because it was hard. He said the challenge would organize and measure the best of the country's energies and skills.
Just seven years later, Neil Armstrong fulfilled Kennedy's goal when he became the first person to step onto the surface of the moon.
In the moment that Kennedy declared this audacious goal, he transformed the idea of traveling to the moon from a fantasy to an achievable ambition.
A clearly defined, attainable goal embodies a vision of what is possible. It's a guide star for developing and applying your abilities to navigate a course through obstacles to a desired destination.
A well-constructed personal goal is challenging, but within your grasp. It takes into account your abilities and the resources you have available, and requires you to make the best use of both.
How's it going?
The way you react to this question reveals a lot about you--and your attitude.
Perception is the physical sensation interpreted in the light of experience; perspective is the way you see or look at something; attitude is the mental position, feeling, or emotion toward a fact or state.
All of these influence the way you interact with the world around you. So all of these will also impact your ability to be positive or negative in any given situation.
Your attitude toward your work, your job, and the situations you find yourself in has a significant impact on how effective, productive, and happy you are. If you have a positive attitude, you're more likely to succeed than if you have a negative attitude.
But why is this?
If you have a negative attitude, you feel bad about the things that happen to you, and you expect the worst.
As a result, when bad things happen, you feel bad, and you're trapped in a cycle of negativity.
Conversely, if you have a positive attitude, you generally feel good about your situation, and so when bad things happen you can take them in stride as "one of those things," and move on.