#spirituality #selfdevelopment #personalitytransformation
5 Areas for Scaling and Self-Development
Today we’re going to talk about an important part of scaling yourself – which areas of life need your attention if you want to grow and develop.
We often try to focus on just one thing, and the modern world constantly emphasizes this. There are so many videos and books talking about how important it is to focus, to do something specific and right.
But today I want to talk to you about five important areas in a person’s life that need constant attention if you want to scale and grow.
By “scaling” and “growth,” I mean a holistic movement through life that aligns with your state and values. Scaling and growth here don’t mean just performing a set of actions that might make you feel bad, suffering for 10, 20 years, or a year, or three months, hoping for some result.
I mean that you are scaling and growing towards achieving different life goals, but at the same time, it’s very important to pay attention to how you feel in each moment of this journey. Essentially, it’s about life itself and how it flows.
The area of self-development: what to focus on in your work
The first area to focus on is professional development.
I’m starting with this because, in our lives, there’s a lot of emphasis on it now – details, trainings, and so on. We’ve heard about it endlessly since childhood when we were in school – the importance of studying, finding a job, how to look for one, the need for a steady or high income – we’re always hearing about this. Professional development can basically be broken down into different components, especially within a business where you manage and operate it.
People often associate their professional development with the job they currently have. I try to keep the focus on the fact that the job you’re in right now, or the business you have, is just one aspect of your professional development.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner or an employee – the important thing is to remember there are areas you pay attention to. When you make decisions through the lens of professional development, like how to earn $3,000 a month instead of $300, or if you’ve been out of work for a year and don’t know how to get started again, or you feel overwhelmed with debt and expenses, not knowing how to break free, or you’re earning an income but terrified of losing it. In recent years, people have felt this fear – that they’re making money but could lose it. When someone feels one of these emotions, they associate it with their current professional activity.
I keep saying to try and separate your overall professional activity: it’s just part of your life, a broad space, and within it, the job or business you’re doing is just one piece.
I’ve had many different businesses and jobs. When I was a student, I worked as an administrator at a computer club, as a programmer at a pharmacy, a programmer in a French company, managed projects in a French company. I had my own software development business in different countries with various partners, a small business selling phones. I was the CEO of a tech company on the market. I had a business and, at the same time, was managing partner and CEO of another company. I had a business in legal services, a business called 2-life in education. I was CEO of an educational project. I have a real estate business, an educational psychology business, an additional professional education business, and a personal growth business. My professional activity is wide-ranging, but it doesn’t stop there. I’m 41 now, and I understand that in the next 10 years, in terms of professional activity, I may experience a thousand times more events than I already have. I might focus only on new things that are happening. I haven’t even mentioned all the projects – some of them were just brief flashes for me in life. In terms of personal growth and forward movement to scale you as a person, always remember that you have professional activity that will break down into different areas. For example, within business ownership, you’ll focus on areas like partnerships, business development, niche selection, strategy, safety in business, and team leadership.
There’s the area of managing a business, with internal departments where you need to focus: marketing, sales, product, management, finance, security (legal, tax, accounting). Why do I give these examples of departments in business and your professional life? For someone who doesn’t own a business, they need to focus on relationships with their boss, the company’s goals, the current competitive market, their offer, motivation systems, the team they work with, and the region they’re in. Why do this? Why understand these directions? When you understand that within professional activity there are subdivisions, you won’t just base your decisions on your current job. You’ll see things more broadly: are you ready to work with a team like this, what kind of motivation do you need in life, are you ready to work just for a monthly salary or only on a bonus system, which countries and formats are you ready to work in? You’ll pay attention to these things without being tied to your current job.
For example, someone works in an office and makes a thousand dollars a month. They know their boss is authoritarian, it’s impossible to negotiate with him. They limit their whole professional life to just this company. It’s important to understand that the world has everything: companies that are authoritarian and those where you can chat about cats and dogs; teams that become your friends, and teams where you won’t even be able to discuss anything at all, even professionally, it will be tough to debate; jobs where you have a certain level of freedom, making decisions on your own, and jobs where you can’t decide anything – where you’re just making sales calls every second, talking 8, 10, 12, or 15 hours a day. There are many details within professional activity, and it’s important to separate scaling in your professional life from your specific job. This topic may seem abstract, but I want to emphasize again that it’s one of the areas in life that requires your attention. When you look at the professional area, you do it through the lens of different states. It would be strange to say that life consists only of business, Youtube, Amazon, E-commerce, or just partnerships.
The wider your perception, the greater your ability to grow on a larger scale. When you perceive things more broadly, it launches tens of thousands of different lines of action automatically. When you’re developing through one very narrow detail, you only have one path – you can’t choose from ten thousand paths; they simply don’t exist.
The sphere of personal development: what does it include?
The second direction in terms of scaling and moving forward in life is personal development. This may seem a bit abstract. Personal development has an internal direction, subtopics: restoring your state, scaling, goals and strategy, the meaning of life, a broad perception, values.
Why is it important to separate personal development and professional activity in this context? To understand, when you are analyzing values while at work, and you, for example, have a problem – you don’t know how to get rid of the feeling that you are always short on money and this has been going on for an unclear amount of time – it’s important to separate: there is your current job, with its specific circumstances, and there is professional activity, where there’s some strategy, meaning in life, and value. Then, separately in terms of your personal development, there is the meaning of life, and separately there are values.
The values in professional activity and the values in personal development are separate, and they should never be mixed. This comes up when the question is asked if you can work together with a friend.
I always say: “If you know how to separate friendship, acquaintanceship, family connection with a person from professional activity, then sure, no problem.”
A truly scalable person is one who can see more broadly and, at a certain moment, choose to separate this connection and feel comfortable saying: “You’re my employee,” even if that person is from your family. Because you agreed at the start that at some point this person works for you. Or you agreed that you work for your relative. Can you separate the space between home and work? This is a very good marker of scale. If you’re always mixing everything up, if you’re telling your husband to behave the same way at work as at home, if you’re telling your friend and getting offended because they didn’t pay you for work you agreed on, if you’re telling your acquaintance they didn’t invite you into the business but should’ve invited you instead of someone else – this means you can’t separate the space between you.
Not all relatives are family. The sphere of family ties
The third area that is very important for a person in terms of attention in life for scaling and development is family. It may seem strange that personal development doesn’t include family, but it’s important to separate: personal development is one thing, and family is the interaction with other people.
Family has its own internal directions: your husband or wife, girlfriend or boyfriend, children, parents. And within family, there’s a fourth factor that can be singled out separately – these are the people you consider your family.
You often hear me say that family isn’t always people who are relatives. In fact, I don’t even consider all relatives to be family, and non-relatives become my family. They fall into this area of focus for expansion, development, and growth.
Some people say, “I don’t have kids right now, so that’s not a point of focus for me.” The question isn’t about the current moment or what happens in 20 years when someone says, “I keep my focus on 20 years ahead, my kids will grow up, I won’t care anymore.” The question is what point in life you’re at now, what point will you be at in 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years, and what will your state be throughout life regarding this space.
These four internal directions are somewhat abstract separations for you right now to hear. You need to keep this in mind and understand that you want to scale and develop. You need a focal point in the direction of your parents and in the direction of your spouse. But not the current point of focus – a much broader one. This means that it’s not about: do you or your spouse earn money? Do you travel together or separately? Is one happy while the other is not? One does sports, and the other doesn’t? One is smarter than the other? One studies, and the other doesn’t? One loves to cook, and the other doesn’t?
The question is what your relationship will be throughout your entire life at every moment in time and how it will change. Everyone has gone through this: once you didn’t like certain food, but now you do. I was a kid and couldn’t eat zucchini pancakes, but now I do. I was a kid and didn’t like olives, but now I love them. I was a kid, and my grandmother used to make me salad at the dacha, gathering all the leaves she could find – from trees, the ground, and maybe even under the ground – chopping them up and filling a plate for me and my sister, then drenching it in oil. I’d look at it and think: who even eats this? And now, if I go to a restaurant and they bring me a plate of mixed salad, especially with those strange leaves, I’m willing to pay two or three times as much for it. Preferences change.
It’s important to understand that your movement with your partner in life will change. Whether this person is in your life now or not; if not – your attitude toward it will change. Your desire and constancy with this person will change. Some people say they don’t need a steady relationship, while others need only steady relationships. Everything will change. At the very least, there will come a time when everyone has no partner, and this pair will end, for example, with someone dying earlier. I’m not even mentioning the sheer number of marriages people go through. And you must remember that in your life, besides professional development, there’s family, which has many areas of movement. I recently released a video about children. A close friend of mine said he hadn’t watched it, even though he doesn’t usually miss my videos. He’s engaged in interacting with me, including when he chooses the role of student and I become the teacher. I asked why he hadn’t watched the video about children, and he replied, “That’s not an interesting topic to me, I don’t have kids.” But the point is that it should be interesting because it’s an incredible point of growth, scale, and development for a person.
Attention to spiritual development
The fourth area that holds fundamental importance for me and that I do not separate is spiritual development, spiritual life.
A close acquaintance of mine (we have a video where she is the student, and I am the teacher) recently said that a while back I was talking about how important it is to see that the spiritual world doesn’t stand apart from business, family. The spiritual world contains business, personal life, family, professional development; everything is inside it – it is the source, not the other way around. And she says: “I’ve started to understand this a bit differently, and I see that it means something completely different.”
Today, however, we’ll look at spiritual development as a certain area that needs attention. If it’s the foundation of your life – which is rare but something people eventually come to because they aren’t able to perceive it or see it yet – consider it as something alongside. And spiritual development is briefly divided into certain internal directions, so you can focus on them.
You can single out what’s called practice, meditation; what’s called spiritual science; and I would also single out the area of deep immersion into knowledge.
We can look at this last one using mathematics as an example. You could have studied math in school, or you could have gone to university and studied it there, or you could dedicate your life to this science. You could’ve gone to some classes to learn to play the piano, or you could’ve gone to a music school, or you could’ve become a musician in life.
Deep immersion into knowledge means being involved in it your entire life. It’s not about professionalism but about your internal state, your capacity and desire to do it. Like with food: I’m in deep immersion into nutrition. Maybe at some point, I read some books on how it’s done or saw it and did a few small things. Then, I studied widely what kinds of cuisines exist and tried to do some things. When I was 12-14 years old, I started cooking a lot. In the last 30 years, I’ve done almost everything, and I still do it easily. If I need to cook for 20 people – I do it easily; that’s deep immersion into that direction. I’ve already developed a habit; there’s attention there, it’s become automatic.
Team development
The fifth area to focus on is the team. Within a team, there are familiar people, your friends, people you interact with professionally or in business. Your family is also your team.
And there are people who are with you throughout your life, and that’s something else: these are people who have transitioned from one sphere to another or are in different spheres. There could be someone in your friends’ circle, someone from your family, someone who was in business, someone in professional development, but these are people who’ve been with you for a long time, and you see the cause-and-effect connection with them. Paying attention to your team from different angles is very important in life – constantly reflecting on it, reviewing it, and directing energy and focus there.
Every Sphere - Your Reflection
We’ve discussed five spheres, directions of life within them, and talked about 20-25 or 30 inner sub-directions or parameters.
When we talk about real scaling of development – it means that you are constantly reflecting on all the spheres and sub-spheres, and within them, there are more sub-parameters and so on. You’re constantly crossing them, don’t prioritize what’s more or less important. Try to understand: each of these points, words, spheres, and directions plays an incredible role in your life. This expands your perception: the broader your perception, the more you move toward scaling, development.
Here’s an interesting point to remember: the zones, spheres, parameters that become habits for you reflect your calm perception of life. If your habit is suffering, self-pity, self-love, talking about other people, restlessness that happens in your life and in your mind, quarrels, constant thoughts about how to relax – this is not real, not wide attention and perception.
Each of these spheres should have a reflection in your life through a state of observation when you consciously perceive it, and have the ability to create in each of these spheres: you create in sales, in your own motivation, with the people you interact with, with your parents, with your husband, in travel, from the point of view of your life meanings and values, in every moment of your life. Remember this. It’s important to start acting in these directions.