Personal Development Courses and Training

What is Personal Development or Soft Skills training?

With so much emphasis on the professional element of development, it's important to remember that training that develops personalities will also help businesses be more effective. Confident and happy employees create a dynamic and inspiring work environment, where innovation grows.

Personal effectiveness is a combination of factors, which all impact the overall wellbeing, work performance and personal satisfaction.  Personal Development incorporates many aspects of people's professional lives, and aims to make them better.

Courses that boost your personal effectiveness

Personal effectiveness training includes a broad range of options for those who seek to further develop the key skills and techniques: personal impact, influence, assertiveness and effectiveness in dealings with others. Personal Development courses will help you:

• Analyse current effectiveness in terms of time and priority management
• Identify the right situations and techniques to communicate assertively
• Deal with conflict situations and ‘difficult’ people
• Consider the most appropriate influencing style(s) to achieve positive results
• Recognise the factors that contribute to building personal profile and impact
• How to develop a personal action plan to enhance personal effectiveness at work

In developing the skills and attitudes that bring personal and professional success, mental health plays a significant role. Courses in mental health provide and understanding of essential concepts and techniques that can help improve and sustain mental health.

Personal Development - Explore your options

In terms of time management and prioritisation, personal development training provides the key to streamlining your efforts towards activities that are valuable for you as an individual and for you as a professional. Some people find it difficult to refuse requests and say ‘No’, or need to learn how to manage their emotions more effectively, for which a Personal Development course can be most helpful.

Personal Development courses are also aimed at helping people to build up their confidence, and enable people to deal with ‘difficult’ people. Gaining an understanding of ways to persuade and influence others in order to achieve results is often one of the main aims of Personal Development programmes. Personal Development also helps those who wish to raise their own personal profile and impact. Personal Development is a broad and complex topic, often referred to in some instances as 'self-help' and covers the following areas:

• Workload management
• Time management: pressure
• Using the right language: negative and positive
• Placing blame: can raise or lower stress
• Taking control pro-actively
• Understanding perception
• Motivation and inspiration
• Organisation and efficiency
• Increasing creativity

Assertiveness training courses

There is a vital link between assertiveness, confidence and self-esteem, and through recognising this connection and taking a training course in assertiveness you will develop an understanding of how with the right techniques you can establish better working relationships using assertiveness.

Additionally not only will you will gain the tools and techniques to boost your confidence and build your self-esteem, you will learn how to handle difficult situations and people confidently and assertively. With assertiveness training delegates experience new ways to deal with criticism, confrontation, anger, and negativity effectively and positively.

Build your self-confidence and personal impact

The key to building your self-confidence is learning how to maintain a positive outlook in situations in which the myriad of consequences maybe both bad and good, and managing to overcome and move on effectively. To become more confident means learning to believe that you can achieve your goals and aims and believing in your ability to succeed. Confidence training courses can help be more assured of yourself, and be more able to support others.

Investing in training to increase your self-confidence will enable you to feel less worried about issues at work, more able to focus and achieve attainable results and successfully achieve your goals, and ultimately be happier in you business and personal life. Training courses in confidence building often identify the best approach to use when voicing ideas and opinions to colleagues and especially senior managers, and cover the following topics:

• Moving from negative to positive ways of thinking – building your self-esteem and mindfulness.
• Are you saying 'yes' when you should be saying 'no'?
• The art of persuasion – getting ideas across
• Understanding how self-esteem affects confidence and influences behaviour – using assertive language

Stress Management training courses

Managing stress is about taking charge: this relates to your emotions, your schedule, your environment, and the way you deal with problems. Stress management begins with identifying the sources of stress in your life and learning how to recognise the signs of stress. The true sources of stress aren’t always obvious, and it’s all too easy to overlook your own stress-inducing thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. It is often the case that business professionals become stressed due to procrastination, rather than the actual job demands, that leads to deadline stress.

Training courses in stress management aim to enable participants to understand and state what stress at work is, identify potential sources of pressure and find out what creates and dictates levels of stress at work. Additionally, stress management training is very valuable as it enables participants to understand the link between time pressures and stress, as well as the relationship between workload and stress, and to identify strategies for gaining and maintaining a balanced workload. Another avenue to relieve stress is to take courses that develop new hobbies such as creative writing courses, or interior design courses.

Time Management training

Closely related to Stress Management, and one of the main elements of Personal Development - Time Management refers to a range of skills, tools, and techniques used to manage time when accomplishing specific tasks, projects and goals. Increasing your time management skills will enable you to become more efficient, more productive and ultimately less stressed. Training courses in time management are designed to help participants develop their skills in time management to achieve more effective results in less time. Time management training courses and workshops also  help delegates increase work effectiveness and productivity, achieve greater control of their daily activities and overcome stress, incorporating proven techniques for mastering time.

A time management course can help you to:

• Identify your time wasters and adopt strategies for eliminating them from your routine
• Recognise procrastination and potential causes and use effective techniques to overcome these.
• Clarify and prioritise your objectives and goals.
• Adopt appropriate strategies for dealing with interruptions.
• Use practical techniques for organising work.
• Reduce time spent in meetings yet contribute more effectively to your team projects
• Delegate work more effectively

Find yourself facing time constraint to attend these courses? Then these short term personal development courses may be extremely helpful to you.