When you think about self-improvement, what comes to mind? Do you feel like you don’t know where to begin, or are you unsure of what exactly you might need to improve? Maybe you struggle with prioritizing. The tips below can help you start on a project of self-improvement now.

Helping Others

Most people could benefit from making a pledge to help others more. Helping others improves you as a person by making you more generous, open-hearted, and empathetic. There are many ways you could do this from large to small. You could let the person at the grocery store with just two items go ahead of you or yield to someone in traffic who’s having trouble changing lanes.

You could also take much bigger actions, volunteering regularly or taking on a role that could change someone’s life. If you know a young person who is struggling to put the money together to attend college, you could become a cosigner on a private student loan and help them get approved. It is important to fully understand what this involves, and you may have other questions as well, such as whether you can do this if your credit is poor. You can review a guide that explains this.

Setting Boundaries

Helping others is wonderful, but there is such a thing as being too selfless. If you give constantly, you’ll eventually burn out and won’t be able to help anyone, so as important as the above approach is, you might be already doing that to your detriment. The solution to this is learning to set boundaries. If you say yes to everything anyone asks you to do because you feel bad about saying no, you probably need to set boundaries. But the situation does not even have to be that dire. You might simply be giving too much of yourself.

Start by thinking about how you want to define your boundaries. Maybe you want to carve out some time for yourself on weekends, or maybe you don’t want to listen to a certain old friend complaining yet again about something they won’t do anything to change. Maybe you don’t want to keep loaning money to people, or perhaps you want to be more mindful about when you do offer help. Once you’ve set your boundaries, think about how you will communicate and enforce them.

Set Goals

This is a real key to self-improvement. You must be striving toward something specific, and setting goals is a great way to define for yourself what really matters. Your goals need to be yours and not what anyone else thinks they should be. You may need to spend some time thinking before you set your first goals, and when you do make them, they need to be as specific as possible.

Instead of saying “I want to get in shape,” say something like “I want to run a 5K by next March.” Notice that this statement names a specific thing that will show progress, running the 5K, and gives a time limit. These two elements give you the ability to measure how well you are moving toward your goals.

Big goals can be reached by making a lot of smaller ones that bridge the point where you are in your life now and where you want to be. If you’re a waiter who wants to be a physician, you might feel overwhelmed about what to do first, but think about your goals methodically.

Your first step should be to start researching medical schools, figuring out what the qualifications are and gaining those qualifications, which might include shoring up your math and science. Next, you would research and apply to medical schools. Then, you would set goals about succeeding in your classes. Each step takes you closer to your goal.