If you ask some of today’s professional athletes you will find that the local little leagues like Babe Ruth baseball, Pee Wee football, or YMCA basketball were the places that they began to grow into the people they are today. If you ask many singers, you will find the church choir was where many of them got their debut.

By participating in these activities, the people we see today learned a lot about life in the context of what they were involved in. They lessons about discipline, teamwork, self-motivation, and sportsmanship were the greatest takeaways from those experience for those of who didn’t go on to play or sing professionally.

The traditional way of personal development was to focus on yourself. Grow, develop, get better at being you by yourself. A new way of thinking about personal development is to immerse yourself into your passions and seek to get good at that and in the process of doing so, you will become a better human being.

How can you develop leadership skills alone? Many of the soft skills that we need to grow personally can’t be developed personally. They require being immersed in a context that will indirectly or directly give you those skills.

For some of us, our platform is our campus, our community, an organization, or our job. The clearer you are about what your platform is and the personal growth outcomes you are looking for, the more fulfilled you will be and the more you will grow. What’s your platform?

Live purposefully!