After my first article on self-development, I received a number of queries regarding developing the "ultimate" islamic development programme. The more I've thought about it, the more I realised that an islamic self-development programme consists of developing one-self in ALL areas of your life including your spiritual life. Many a times, we see people either going for one or the other, they either focus wholly on developing their "islamic" side OR they focus completely on developing skills which they'll need in their life, but rarely have these 2 sides been put together.

Therefore, what I'm proposing here today is an "islamic" self-development programme based on the principle that Islam is a way of life, and not just a religion. Hence, we should develop in ALL areas including our spiritual life. What you'll find as you read along is that part of improving our Islam would be to improve the many aspects of our life and the skills we need to improve our life.

We've three simply practices, that would hopefully set us all on a path of self-development:

1) Recognise areas of self-development
2) Develop Habits
3) Review your development

Recognise areas of self-development:This is a tough one, we tend to be rather generous about our weaknesses and rarely see ourselves in a negative light, (hence we always stumble in interviews when asked "What's your weakness?"). But there are easy ways to identify these areas.

1) Categorise the different spheres of your life.This links to the idea I've set in the beginning of this post that any self-development programme should tackle all aspects of our life as these are inter-linked especially that we'll be questioned about each and every aspect of our life on the Day of Judgement. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't categorise the different aspect of our life. We should definitely do so as this will help in our self-development exercise. So the first step is to recognise the different spheres within your life that need improving or that you're generally involved in. E.g. one sphere could be your Islamic sphere. Another sphere is your family sphere, a third your friends sphere, a fourth your work sphere..etc.

2) Identify one particular area in that sphere you wish to improve. For example, in your Islamic sphere you would like to start to read Quran more regularly OR start praying Tahajjud every night. In your family sphere, you may want to keep regular contacts with your extended family. In your work sphere, you may want to develop the meetings with your colleagues so that they run more efficiently.

3) Identify at least ONE SPECIFIC activity you can do REGULARLY to improve in that particular area in your chosen sphere. They key words are underlined: One activity, and regularly done. Sometimes when embarking on a self-development scheme we tend to throw ourselves into doing 10 things at once to improve "rapidly" in an area that we end up giving it all up in the end. So do select one activity that you keep on doing. And as Prophet Muhammad(Peace be upon him) said in a hadeeth, Allah loves the good deeds to be done, even if they are little. So following on from the examples above, the one activity for reading more Quran would be reading one page a day after fajr salat for example. For the keeping in touch with extended family, an idea would be to schedule one day a month to call all your extended family..etc.

Developing Habits: So you've chosen your area of development and you've decided on ONE SPECIFIC REGULAR activity to do to help you develop in your chosen sphere. The question is how you maintain it. Well, the key is the hadeeth I just mentioned earlier. The one that speaks about doing things regularly even if little, i.e. develop a habit. Now we can lecture each other on forming habits and how we can instill good habits in our lives..etc. But you know what I found (and this can be a personal opinion) the best way to develop a habit is to have a system in place that highlights visually whether or not you're developing a habit or not. For me, the most effective habit formation method I've come across is the simple Habit List, pioneered by Productivity501.com.

The Habit List: I strongly urge you to click on the following link to read exactly the steps you need to develop a Habit using the Habit list. (http://www.productivity501.com/habit-list/308/). Simply put, the Habit List, is a to-do list for your habits. The following is an example of a filled-in Habit List (you can download a template for personal use from the link above):

See the top part, where it says Context; this is where you put your sphere we spoke about earlier, e.g. Your Islamic sphere or Work sphere or personal sphere etc. Then in the list below, list the specific regular activities we spoke about earlier for that particular sphere. Although I was advocating simply having ONE activity per sphere in order to maintain one's focus, feel free to be adventurous and add more than one activity in each sphere.

The second most important part of the habit list is you ticking each time you do the activity. This gives you a visual understanding whether you're developing a habit or not. I was thinking about this earlier and realised that this could be a powerful tool to stop yourself committing a sin you often do. If you have a visual representation showing the number of times you've transgressed upon yourself, think how visually powerful this tool can be to help you stop and repent. Or if you have had a series of "good" days and you wake up for fajr on time, think how powerful your determination would be to keep that up, as you don't want to see a blank in your habit list.

Developing a Habit can easily be done by regularly doing an activity, after all, as a famous quote one said "we're but creatures of habit".

Review your developement: You've developed a number of good habits (and hopefully stopped the bad ones), the key question is: What next? There's no way that one can reach the height of their personal, islamic, work development plan no matter how long they've been learning and forming good habits. There's always more. And that's part of the beauty of the world we're living in. Learning never stops, improving never stops, and even if we stop learning or developing, the world won't. So we've a choice, either we sit in our comfortable spheres thinking we're ok, or we constantly review our activities and habits and seek ways to improve them.

I once read in a NY Times article how although we should avoid "stressing" ourselves, we should never stop "stretching" ourselves. This means that we should always try to get out of our comfort zone, try new things everyday, and learn new stuff. Otherwise, old-age diseases such asalzheimer will act on us quicker than we thought.

In summary, an Islamic self-development programme consists of developing the whole-self since Islam is a way of life and not just a set of activities that is separate from our day to day life. We should approach this self-development programme by firstly recognising the need to self-develop, and secondly recognising the different spheres in our lives that need developing. One these two have been recognised. The next step is to identify one regular activity that we can do in order to develop in each of the identified spheres, and have a system in place to ensure that these activities are done regularly to form a habit. Finally, our development programme should never stop, and should constantly be reviewed. I advocate a review every 6 months, but one can change the length as he/she sees best.

I would love to know your thoughts about this topic in the comments below and any ideas you want to share.