Website news

For the past few months, I’ve been following a great blog called Generally Thinking. Today I’ve finally got the time to recommend you some of the articles I really liked.

What is Generally Thinking blog about?

Maintained by a psychology student Warren Davies, Generally Thinking is a blog with two major areas of focus: identifying your personal strengths and being happy. I am interested in both topics, and it’s been great so far to see Warren’s view of how strengths are identified and cultivated and why some people are happier than others. I’m a very happy person myself, but reading some of the articles on Generally Thinking helped me understand why I’m happy and to therefore plan some of my future steps in a way that they allow people around me to be happier as well.

Great articles on happiness

Here are just some of the really good posts I’ve found:

• Happiness and genetics – who would have thought there’s a relation between the two?
• How to be happier – 10 scientifically supported ideas – if you need solid reasoning for feeling happier, you’ll love this article
• Does marriage bring happiness? (yes, it does)

Articles on identifying and developing your core strengths

• What to do with your strengths – surprisingly enough, for many of us it’s a valid question even after we got the strengths identified
• You can do anything you set your mind to vs Stick to your strengths – there are successful examples backing each of these statements, this article explores the topic

Generally Thinking is a young blog, but I really like how Warren always refers to other sources of information – this isnt’ a common trend in most of personal development blogs. Sometimes we all really need this extra bit of scientific proof that something works and something doesn’t.

Let me know if you like the blog, and stay tuned for more!

Welcome to the brand new, shiny Personal Development blog!

Starting today, this blog will sport a new design reflecting a chance of my focus.

Things you’ll probably notice right away are less ads and less clutter, fewer main menu options and a second-level menu highlighting the four categories of posts I spend most of my time on:

• Goal setting
• Productivity
• Motivation
• Happiness

There’s more to come in about two months time, but until then – enjoy your stay and let me know if there’s anything else I can do to make this website even more useful.

I’ve finally decided to start guest blogging. In the coming weeks, this blog will post articles by other bloggers, which are my guests.

Their blogs will be posting my articles too, and it is believed that such an approach will help us all learn new people and discover interesting blogs.

Today, my guest is Alex Shalman from Practical Personal Development blog. His post will be published in just few minutes, and I just want to thank him once again for participation. I really like the benefits of guest blogging, and look forward to doing it again in the future!

My post has just been posted on his blog as well, so please have a look: How To Manage Your Time Effectively.

If anyone else is interested in guest blogging – please use the contact form to let me know!

Google has just announced a great new feature which allows anyone to enjoy a fully customized search engine. The main advantage is that it allows you to search many sites instead of one, and you can specifically search through only their pages and not the whole Web. I just cannot resist to such an opportunity, and that’s why I present you our very own Personal Development Search.

I have made many friends in the past half a year of my involvement with personal development, and I would really like you all to join this search page and make it easier for anyone to find your great articles. Our community around Personal Development Ideas grows slowly but surely, and I see this search page as a great opportunity for us all to grow and make this project a more useful resource for all.

So, if you want me to add your website to the Personal Development search, please leave URLs in comments to this post, and I’ll post an update as I make progress adding them to the search. Of course, you’re also more than welcome to email me directly or use the contact form.

At this stage, I don’t want to take my chances by adding your websites to the search myself, and so I would really like you to share your URLs in a comment to this post. After the initial submission period is over (I expect it to be two weeks or so), I will start adding more websites to the search myself.

I’m telling you, I’m really excited about this – something tells me this is going to be a great search page for everyone interested in personal development, motivation, productivity and time management.

Thanks in advance for sharing your links!

Updating my Amazon’s wish list to keep track of the next few books to buy and read, I’ve decided to put a link to it in the sidebar of this blog. A few more things came to my mind, and that’s how they all quickly grew into a separate Support this site section.

I’m really happy with the progress of this project so far, and I benefit from it in many ways. At the same time, I always feel there is more to be learned and shared, and I notice myself spending increasingly more time doing research, finding new people to talk to and learn from, exploring software and reading books.

I can definitely use some help to make Personal Development Ideas an even better place for all of us, and here’s what YOU can do:

Share your knowledge and help me grow

I find your emails and advices to be most useful, and I would love to get more of them as they keep me motivated and help me grow. Please feel free to do any of the following:

• share your personal advice (just use this contact form to send me an e-mail)
• point me to an article you find relevant and interesting (your own ones are most valued ones for me as they come from your own experience)
• suggest me a book I should read. If you feel particularly grateful for some article of mine or just want to be generous – please buy me a book from my Amazon wish list.
• suggest a software you think is useful. If you’re an author of a software package – please send me a copy of it. If you want me to review it (and post a summary of it here on my pages), just ask!
• suggest me an audio program – there are so many around, that I could definitely use your suggestions and friendly advices

Help PersonalDevelopment.ie grow

I wish I could spend even more time working on this project, but even at its current pace I see it finally shaping up. I’ve got many more plans and ideas for it, but your opinion is always valued, so please let me know if you want to help:

• link to Personal Development blog main page or any article you found useful on my site (PLEASE tell me if you do it without using trackbacks, so that I have a better chance of noticing and thanking you for this) from your websites. I don’t have a link exchange block setup just yet, so I can’t promise a permanent link back to you, but I can certainly suggest your website in one of my Saturday Links weekly posts
• suggest my website to your friends which could benefit from it (if you feel like nobody will really benefit, please tell me why and I promise to fix the situation!)
• bookmark my pages in your social bookmarks service (del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, digg and anything else you use)
• take time to leave a comment to this post
• let me know what you would like to see changed/improved about this site (you might find the feedback form to be most useful for this and I’ll be sure to continue our email conversation)

Donate

If you feel like making a small donation, please use any of this to do so, and be assured that all your help is greatly appreciated:

• send me a book on personal development you’ve already read yourself
• use the PayPal donation button on the sidebar
• send me your software package and give me a registration key
• buy me a book from my Amazon wish list

Are you still reading?! Incredible! You must be one of my loyal and regular readers, which makes you one of the most important and valued visitors to go through my pages. THANK YOU for all the help and attention, your continuous support means a lot to me.

pS: if you’re not a regular reader yet, this is even more impressive that you’re still reading these lines. THANK YOU too! Please come back again, I’ll be sure to have something interesting ready.

I’ve just activated a plugin which allows you to subscribe to any post comments using your email. This should make it much easier for you to track those posts and comments you’re particularly interested in.

From now on, you should see a tick box under just under the new comment tex area, which reads like this:

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail

Just make sure your email in the appropriate field is spelled correctly, and tick the box – that’s all you need to receive any further comments everyone else will make to a post.

I’m working on the new design for this site, so if you have any suggestions – please let me know and I’ll do everything to make your experience with my blog easy and pleasant. Thanks!