A good personality goes a long way in the business world. While your skills and credentials are extremely important, they’re worthless if you aren’t able to get people to like you, trust you, and want to spend time with you. If you’re interested in improving yourself so that your true potential can shine through, here are 10 tips on how to improve yourself and your personality.
1) Smile
One of the easiest ways to make people feel more positive around you is by smiling. When you smile, it makes other people feel happy in your presence. Smiling also helps improve your mood and outlook on life by helping reduce stress levels. Whether you’re feeling down or going through a rough patch in life, try putting on a smile—it just might change your outlook for the better! One study found that individuals who smiled reported greater self-confidence than those who didn’t.
2) Focus on Your Eyes
It might seem like a simple task, but maintaining eye contact can help you feel more confident when speaking with others. Maintaining eye contact is also a good indicator of interest; it shows you’re engaged in what someone else is saying. However, don’t overdo it—staring at someone for too long is not only creepy, but also a sign of disrespect. Practice making eye contact with friends and coworkers as often as possible until it becomes second nature.
3) Practice Getting Things Done
Do you find yourself overwhelmed with a mess of scattered ideas in your head? If so, it might be time to give David Allen’s productivity methodology, Getting Things Done (GTD), a try. I personally recommend heading straight for his book, but if you want something more streamlined for what would take several hours otherwise, consider checking out Zen To Done: The Ultimate Simple Productivity System. It’s basically GTD boiled down into its most essential pieces—something you can put into practice right away.
4) Keep a Schedule
Often times, we like to leave things open-ended. While that’s fine from time to time, we shouldn’t operate with a strict whenever I feel like it attitude. Instead, think about what you want to accomplish for each day or week. From there, create a schedule that blocks out your time so you don’t have any confusion about what you should be doing at different times throughout your day.
5) Visualize
Visualizing what you want can be incredibly powerful. Think about when you’ve seen someone on TV or in real life and immediately thought, I need that! You start thinking about how your life would be different if you could only have that thing. Visualization gives you a more tangible vision of what it would be like to have everything you want. In psychology, visualization is often used as part of a treatment for athletes, including Olympians and professional ball players.
6) Be Present
If you’re always stuck in your head, you’ll be less able to focus on what’s going on around you. And that can make socializing very difficult. In order to improve your ability to talk with others, practice being in the moment. Try not looking at your phone or thinking about things like work or other problems during a conversation.
7) Stand Up Straight
Stand up straight with your shoulders back. Research shows that good posture makes you appear more confident, which makes you feel more confident—good posture actually improves your self-esteem. Moreover, standing up straight can help reduce neck pain by alleviating stress on your spine. Just remember to keep breathing!
8) Speak Clearly, Directly, and Calmly
Other people won’t be able to engage in a conversation with you if you speak too quickly, or all over yourself. Don’t rattle off instructions and directions; be direct, clear, concise, and slow. But don’t force your speech; let it flow naturally. Even when things get exciting (and they will), try your best not to get ahead of yourself—it can make what you have to say incoherent.
9) Learn How to Listen
Listening is one of those essential life skills that people can do, but few actually do well. Many people have heard the golden rule—treat others as you want to be treated—but they rarely treat others that way themselves. If you want to be a better friend, family member, or coworker, then practice listening as much as possible.
10) Don’t Judge Others
When you judge others, it’s hard not to feel a little better about yourself. But think about it—if you’re putting people down because of their physical appearance or their intelligence level, aren’t you saying that these traits are bad? You should always be kind toward everyone, no matter how different they are from you.