FIVE WAYS TO BECOME A BETTER PERSON

Why Become A Better Person?

No one is perfect! But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to be. When people say ‘life isn’t fair’, they are right in the sense that it isn’t fair for anyone, not just you.

You may have unique situations at any given time, but so does everyone else.  Your creator gave you challenges and also opportunities to overcome those challenges. 

To become a better person, you should look at life as a game where the only rule is to try and be the best version of yourself at any given time. 

To become a better person means you need to begin taking the necessary steps to be healthier, more productive, more creative, more confident, happier and have better relationships at work and home. 

What to Do Before You Become a Better Person.

The first thing you should do before you embark on a journey to become a person is to take a deep look at yourself and learn who you really are.

As you do this, ask yourself this question: What do I want in life? 

Only when you understand who you really are will you be able to know what you want. From there, look into what you can realistically get out of your life.

In this article, we’ll be looking at the five things you should do if you want to keep yourself growing and improving to become a better person. These are concrete steps that anyone can take but which can help self-improvement over time.

1. Learn

One of the most important things you can do to develop yourself and become a better person is to learn. That means that you should keep on taking on new challenges, discovering new things. You may also need to develop new skills and abilities.

Maybe you attend an electronic engineering or online marketing seminar. Maybe you go dancing or yoga classes. Perhaps you teach yourself to use a new piece of software to further your career. Or maybe you learn a new language.

Whichever of these options you choose, continuing to learn will help to make your brain more plastic as produces neurotransmitters associated with the growth and development of neurons and neuronal connections.

You’ll produce more brain-derived neurotrophic factor, dopamine, and norepinephrine. And as a result, you will find all new topics easier to learn. Your brain will be more similar to that of a much younger person’s. Not bad huh!

The same is true for the brain as is for the body. You can either grow and improve, or you can atrophy and deteriorate. The body is always changing.  It is simply up to you whether it changes for the better or for the worse.

The body is always changing. It is simply up to you whether it changes for the better or for the worse.

And if nothing else, continually learning new things will give you a broader mind, a wider range of experiences. You also develop skills to draw upon and a ton of useful knowledge.

And the new ideas and concepts that you can come up with as a result of combining experience from many different fields are almost limitless. This is how you become a ‘polymath’ like Da Vinci, Steve Jobs, or Elon Musk.

2. Travel

Traveling is incredibly important, but not only for your happiness and your sense of accomplishment and purpose. It’s also makes you a more rounded and even a more decent human being.

Did you know that people are rated as more tolerant and understanding if they went to college? What? You don’t become a better person by going to college!!

This has nothing to do with education or background – it is simply that people who have moved away from home have less narrow views and a better understanding of the wider world.

And this is even truer for those people who travel far and wide. They get to mingle with other cultures and see other places for themselves. This broadens your mind and gives you a ‘bigger picture’ view.

It can also help you to put things in perspective a little. You realize that many of your troubles and your concerns are actually somewhat petty in comparison to the hunger and poverty you encounter in other parts of the world. 

Part of your journey to become a better person must involve people with different backgrounds, experiences and orientations. People who have traveled and had adventures will be naturally more interesting to talk to. They have such a breadth of experiences to share and also appear more worldly and knowledgeable.

But it’s simply rubbing shoulders with people from different cultures and experiencing unique locales that will truly develop you.

Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis Philosophy

We can get a little deeper in our understanding of how traveling can lead you to become a better person.  Let’s consider the philosophies of Georg Hegel. Hegel believed that it was crucial that we challenge our ideas in order to develop them and to gain a more accurate world view. He described this as requiring a specific process.

The ‘thesis’ is the original idea that you have. The antithesis is the opposite view. And the synthesis is the resultant idea that takes lessons from both views.

In order for us to be as knowledgeable and as effective as possible, it is crucial that we challenge our existing ideas and develop them by incorporating other ideas.

Refusal to do this otherwise will eventually result in our own demise, as we become more and more attached to defunct and irrelevant concepts.

Without these outside views and experiences to challenge us, we simply become more and more extreme in our own views. This happens through ‘confirmation bias’ as we seek out more knowledge to confirm what we already hold to be true.

And it happens through ‘convergence’ and ‘divergence’. That is, the likelihood of in-groups becoming more similar to each other and less similar to out-groups.

How Nature Works

We can look to nature for a great analogy. In nature, the single most important thing for the survival of our DNA is diversity. We seek mates for procreation because they are different from us. Thus, they introduce new genetic material into our makeup.

If we are continually in-bred, then the flaws and imperfections in our DNA become exaggerated to the point that we can even become deformed or unwell as a species!

Conversely, having offspring with people of different cultures and from different regions will create stronger DNA that is less prone to illness.

The same goes for our ideas. This is why it is so good for us as a species to overcome borders and differences and to interact with others that are diverse and varied as possible.

By challenging and constantly reassessing your ideas and beliefs, you will come out with stronger, more accurate, and more useful ideas and beliefs. That’s how you become a better person.

Travel is one of the greatest things you can do for the mind and the soul.

3. Meditate

If there’s one new habit you should consider adopting, then it is meditation. Meditation is simply practised focus and concentration. Here, you will put yourself in a quiet environment and then focus on clearing your mind of distracting and unwanted thoughts.

You will be ruminating on stressful topics, and you will gradually become better at focusing and remaining calm.

This is an incredibly powerful skill for anyone who wants to become a better person. It gives you the ability to rise above stress and panic and to remain calm no matter what is going on around you.

This can make you a happier individual, as you’ll be less bothered by hard days at work or large deadlines. Additionally, it can also make you more effective as you gain greater control over your emotional response, more emotional stability, and the ability to concentrate more effectively on given tasks.

Did you know that meditation physically changes the structure of the brain? It has been demonstrated to increase ‘cortical thickness’. That means there is more grey matter and a greater density of neural connections.

Studies also show that meditation can improve concentration, focus, emotional stability and even IQ. In other words, meditating makes you a more focused and even more intelligent individual.

Did you know that meditation physically changes the structure of the brain?

This can be a difficult habit to get into, especially if you don’t know how it works. 

How to meditate?

The simplest form of mediation is mindfulness meditation. Here, you simply sit somewhere quietly and ‘watch’ your thoughts go by. The idea is to allow them to pass by like clouds without engaging in them or worrying about their content. Don’t punish yourself for letting your mind wander, just make a note of the thought and then dismiss it.

Read: Guided meditation for stress relief

This teaches you to rise above your thoughts and be less concerned about them. Additionally, it helps you to gain a greater understanding of the contents of your own mind so that you can predict your own reactions to future scenarios.

If you struggle to find the time necessary to commit, then try meditating for just 7 minutes a day. This amount of time is short enough that you should be able to slip it in without too much difficulty. But it will be enough to start causing significant changes to the way your brain works.

4. Exercise

It takes more than changing your mindset to become a better person. As goes the body, so goes the mind. It might not be the most exciting or even surprising item on this list. Nevertheless, it’s absolutely crucial that exercise be part of your routine.

Read: Why You Need Exercise…

Exercise is not just important as a way to get more physically fit. It can actually change your hormonal balance and even your brain in profoundly positive ways, hence helping you to become a better person.

Exercise is not just important as a way to get more physically fit. It can actually change your hormonal balance and even your brain in profoundly positive ways, hence helping you to become a better person.

Did you know that exercise – both CV and resistance training – can actually boost your IQ and increase your concentration? One possible explanation for how resistance training might accomplish this is by helping with ‘embodied cognition’.

Embodied cognition is a theory as to the working of the brain. It suggests we actually understand things by using our bodies and our memories of our interactions with the world. When we hear a story about someone being cold, we actually remember what it is like to be cold and even feel it slightly with our bodies.

Training can strengthen your connection with your body. In doing this, it will make you better at using it to understand foreign concepts.

At the same time, getting into better shape will:

• Improve your energy levels.

• Help you to sleep better.

• Make you less prone to illness by improving your immune system.

• Make you more attractive.

• Enable you to look better in your clothes.

• Raise your confidence.

• Improve your physical performance in sports and competition.

• Make you better able to take care of yourself in a physical confrontation.

• And much, much more.

Again, you don’t need to commit to huge amounts of exercise right away. Just a few workouts a week can be enough to start making a difference and you can take this relatively gently at least, to begin with!

Exercise will definitely help you to become a better person. Just do it!

5. Grooming & Style

Everything else on this list has been about making yourself healthier, calmer, and more outwardly. These are deep changes that will affect you from the inside out. However, your process to become a better person should also involve a movement outside-in.

Grooming and taking care of your sense of style is different in that sense. It’s something immediate and easy you can change about yourself that will then begin to make you feel better on the inside.

What I’m trying to say is: don’t write this off as something trite and shallow.

Looking after your appearance is essentially a way to invest in yourself and to demonstrate that you place value in your appearance. This sends a powerful signal to others that makes you seem more capable, more confident, and much more attractive.

As a result, it can help you to increase your chances of getting a job interview, of attracting a member of the opposite sex and of walking into a room and turning heads for all the right reasons.

What’s more, is that the sense of confidence you gain from looking and feeling great can help you to feel better about yourself and to be happier and more content as a result.

How do you start? 

Start by choosing to invest a little more financially into what you wear and how you groom yourself. It’s better to have fewer clothes but for those clothes to be better made. And they say that your haircut should directly reflect the amount of money that you’re responsible for in your career. Ever heard the expression ‘dress for the job you want’?

Consider speaking with a style advisor, certainly be willing to get slightly out of your comfort zone and find a time to groom yourself regularly. Oh, and definitely invest in the future. If you want to feel amazing in 10 years’ time, then moisturizing and protecting yourself from the sun will make a big help!

However, your process to become a better person should also involve a movement outside-in.

Conclusion

To become a better person, you will need to understand that no one is created perfectly. Then, start making the necessary changes to be the best version of yourself. This is a lifelong process.

With all these changes you will slowly begin to evolve from the inside and outside. You will look and act more confident and capable and you will feel healthier, more full of energy and stronger all at the same time.

These 5 steps are not everything that everyone will need. Everyone gets unique challenges and opportunities. The important thing is that when you become a better person, you make the world better for you and the whole universe.

Further reading:

How To Form Good Habits That Stick