Self Growth – Expanding your Mindset
The year is a quarter of the way through already.
Just when you thought New Years Eve was yesterday, and the ‘New Year New Me’ declarations were being shouted boldly from the roof tops, three months have flown by.
So how are those resolutions coming? Are you actively working on achieving your goals? Crushing those barriers and working on a new you?
Maybe resolutions aren’t your thing – or the word itself and the hype that goes along with it aren’t for you. Goals can be made at any time. You don’t need the rolling over of a calendar year to better yourself.
Self growth – bettering yourself, and caring for yourself are all important.
We’ve talked about making sure that you’re not pouring from an empty cup before. You can’t look after others if you’re not looking after yourself. At some point, the system breaks down.
Part of looking after yourself is growing. Setting goals, learning, planning, and moving on up.
Moving up doesn’t mean that you have to climb the rungs of the corporate ladder either. A goal can be simply to eat better, have your coffee ready the night before, or get up a little earlier to go for a walk or work out.
A goal can be anything if it is an improvement for yourself.
And aside from the typical ways of improving yourself that society tends to focus on – like lose weight, exercise, be environmentally conscious and whatever current fad is going around, there are other options.
While personal health should always be made a priority in maintaining a healthy lifestyle and keeping the glass fuller, growing intellectually is something that is often forgotten about.
We are born, go through childhood learning and growing (physically and mentally), until we decide we really like this one thing and this one thing is how we want to spend the rest of our lives. So we focus on this one thing, go to school for it, and get a job. Up until now, we’ve been actively setting goals and achieving them until we’ve gotten that job we wanted (or needed). But why stop there?
There are constantly new developments in many fields, so we never need to stop learning. Things are constantly upgrading and evolving, so why do we remain stagnant? Just because we know what we know and thats it shouldn’t be a good enough reason to put our books and minds away and consent ourselves to a sedentary lifestyle of wake up, work, eat, sleep, repeat.
While there are only so many hours in a day, and yes – for most of us those hours are packed and leave us little to no time to ensure we’re looking after ourselves. By applying a small amount of time management and sacrifice, taking some time to upgrade our learning, and upgrade our skills is something we could all use a little more of.
In the security industry, while the underlying job may seem quite redundant and non evolving – society and the threats that go with it are constantly changing. The world is more vocal then it was ten years ago. Social media has had a big hand in ensuring everyone has a voice, and everyone has a platform to use it. This being said, opinions and thoughts are often taken the wrong way, out of context, or simply as a personal attack when usually they shouldn’t be. Threats can evolve from these situations and therefore security steps in to do their job.
As threats increase, social media increases, and awareness increases – Security needs to be more vigilant then ever.
To practice some self growth in this industry, arming yourself with more knowledge on the different aspects of security is incredibly helpful. There are different types of security ranging from concierge to events, to close protection and so forth. Having knowledge of each part can only help you – not hurt you. It increases your knowledge of the field and gives you more respect for your counterparts task at hand. If the guy overseeing the event comes across the team doing the close protection, if they have some inside knowledge of each others roles, it will allow them to work more fluidly. Not only this, it allows your role to be more interchangeable and yourself to be an important member of the team. If you are able to step in when others can’t, you’re increasing your viability to your organization.
Increasing your knowledge on different aspects and types of combat and when to use them and sometimes more importantly – when not to use them. This will help you not only with your job, but physically as well. You could very will be ticking off two boxes by setting a goal of learning some combat techniques for preventing attacks, and staying in better shape.
Expanding your skill set and your mind set applies to any job. And setting aside time for yourself to achieve greatness while can be potentially daunting and draining, will in the end allow you a bigger cup to pour from.
Guest Blogger Rayna Davies
Rayna Davies is a graduate and practitioner of Business Management. She has developed an expertise in blogging, covering subjects like travel, world events and security. Having grown up with a father who has developed an expertise in Physical Security and Executive Protection in the RCMP and two major corporations, she has personally observed and 
experienced many security details. These experiences have included personally meeting HM Queen Elizabeth, Prime Minister Jean Chretien and many celebrities. She presently assists Sentinel Security in Executive Protection workshops and guest blogging and also assists Gloprosec Preventative Services in Intelligence gathering and Business Administration. Her passions include World travel, having visited every continent.
