Welcome to this personal development blog, your go-to resource for enhancing self-awareness and achieving greater clarity between coaching sessions. Whether you’re looking to deepen your understanding of yourself, sharpen your decision-making skills, or maintain momentum in your personal growth journey, these carefully curated activities are designed to support and inspire you.
Each exercise will empower you to reflect, explore, and evolve, making your time between coaching sessions both productive and transformative. Dive in and discover the strategies that will help you unlock your full potential and navigate your path with confidence and insight.
Personal development as a practice
Personal development happens best when we make time to visit with ourselves. It’s also a wonderful practice that builds self-respect and intrinsic worth. Imagine yourself as important enough to take up time. This is not a privilege. It’s a birthright. What personal development offers:
Why personal development benefits from regular me-time practice
People seek my help so they can orient to the world with confidence. This stance often arises naturally when what we do and how we do it aligns with who we are and our values. However, responding to life instead of reacting is not easy. This is especially true when navigating important life and career transitions and leadership challenges. This is where personal development comes in. Those I work with benefit a great deal from between-session home play activities that some coaches and therapists call homework.
This is especially true when one is dealing with stressful transitions or changing deeply engrained patterns of habitual self-sabotaging behavior. That said, the practices below will support greater wellbeing and emotional and physical health for all. Equally, the activities below can help when healing mind-body splits, strong internal shame, toxic inner critics, or complex emotions that can arise during trauma recovery and offer a wonderful compliment to 1:1 therapy work.
This blog will offer several practical ideas to experiment and play with between sessions. These practices can assist personal development, growth and healing and require about 10 minutes although you can give them more.
1-5 minutes of exploratory writing and other creative tasks to grow and heal
For the activities below, I recommend a paper journal or a cheap notepad to let go of any guilt that you’re going to mess it up. If you enjoy the keyboard more than a pen, a text editor file will do. The goal of keeping a written record is to capture what is, how you are, your thoughts and feelings, likes and peeves, as well as achievements and triumphs, goals and wishes. Think of it as a place to safely rant. A place to formulate a prayer. Your place to exist where you can show up in any state and be welcomed.
Below are three ways I invite my clients to use writing to support their growth and healing. For more information on the benefits of journaling including research, head here.
A: Write what is, for 5 min
This is a 5-minute practice you can do anytime that begins with the words, Right now…. It invites you to simply record what’s happening, what you’re experiencing, what is and isn’t happening and see where the writing takes you.
B: Capture what is going on with this nifty structure
In this exercise, I invite clients to write or list the following things:
This semi-structured emptying onto a page strikes a good balance between giving you five doors to explore your world and discovering what awaits you. It helps externalize all that’s currently happening in your head and in so doing, creates space to see it and decide what really needs your focus and attention. I find this activity useful in building a healthy agency and restoring a calmer state. You may also want to see our calm nervous system states blog to gain an understanding of what we mean by states. If you give this a go and the activity proves too overwhelming for you, seek additional help.
C: Do 5-8 minutes of exploratory writing
Exploratory writing is a great method to explore something on the page by writing or drawing it AND discover something new. It is very different to writing we do as part of our everyday roles such as emails, texts to family and friends, or create work presentations. Exploratory writing has no predetermined path or expectations. All that’s required is that we show up. Exploratory writing invites curiosity, openness and responsiveness in us: qualities we often need in a very volatile and complex world. Here are a few prompts to get you started. Choose one prompt or make your own and write to it for 5 minutes.
2. Short creative activities to deepen your self-knowing
There are a myriad of other activities that will help you connect with yourself better. Here are three of my favorites.
1: Locating what speaks to you in a poem
Read a poem and notice what words or themes resonate with you. A good place to start can be the Academy of American Poets although you may find your own or the lyrics of the top 40 songs of the moment.
2: 5 min newspaper headlines search
Visit your favorite newspaper online or locate a printed copy of one you forgot to recycle. Take a quick tour through the headlines and notice words that hook you in and how they connect with what’s happening to/for you. Note them down.
3: Word associations and stick drawings
Pick a word or phrase that captures what you’re experiencing. Draw a diagram of key associations you hold to this phrase. Have some fun and draw a stick figure drawing that captures what your phrase looks like. How would you feel towards someone else in this place?
3. Creating helpful belief systems
So often clients operate under a key belief that is not serving them well. For example, “Nothing happens unless I work very hard” or “Without pain there is no gain”, or “Nothing good ever happens to me!”. These beliefs invite toil, struggle and negativity. They shape one’s thinking and action. But, we can adopt or reframe them into positive statements or draft a more helpful one. What core belief runs you? Try changing it! Write it. Speak it often. Make it into your screen saver. Help your brain and body connect with it. I recommend this one, “I’m a lucky person. Good things happen to me.”
Additional steps to support you
At Make Time Count we help people connect deeply with themselves and others for fulfilling and meaningful lives. You can…
- Join our monthly newsletter to have monthly personal development prompts and be first to know about our special offers.
- Explore our online events for practical work guided by Dr. Magdalena Bak-Maier or one of our invited special guests.
- Build a more affirming life with our powerful personal development course. Here’s what others say abou it.
Magdalena, hmm where do I even start. She is an amazingly talented and dynamic professional and above all a very warm, caring and generous individual. Her wisdom shines through the first time you meet her. She has an uncanny ability to convey ideas, put things in persepctive and open one to the possibilities of change and transformation.
Her method “Grid” nudges one to pay attention to aspects of life which most of us overlook as busy individuals. If you sign up to work with Magdalena, you will surely be moving towards finding a work-life-self care balance that is unique to you as an indidviual. I can not recommened her highly enough. I am very grateful to her for all our interactions and work-life lessons that I have learnt as a result :)
Kanta Chechi
