Have you ever wondered why people are so enthused about personal growth in all their lives?
Steve Pavlina, one of the most successful bloggers and authors on personal growth, has something to say about personal development:
You must realize that everything you’re experiencing in your human life is temporary. Your body, your home, your career, your possessions, your human relationships — all temporary! When you die, all of those things will be left behind. The simple truth is that nothing rooted in physicality can endure forever.
How shall you live if you know with certainty that it’s all going to end someday?
The answer he found to these questions was growth. By growth he is referring to the development and expansion of your conscious being, the very core of your being, independent of your physical experiences.
The physical world gives consciousness the opportunity to experience itself objectively. This is a tremendous gift.
When you center your life around conscious growth, life reveals a truly magical beauty.
Change In One’s Life For The Better. Whether you call it self-help, personal development and transformation, or just plain growth, it is a goal to which virtually everyone aspires.
Generation after generation of thinkers, philosophers and gurus have tried to come up with models of human development that common men and women could follow to resolve their woes.
Things like lack of self-esteem, unhappy with one’s body weight, difficulty of maintaining good relationships with people they care about, achieving financial freedom, seeking happiness and relieving pains, are just a few of the stuff in which people the world all over are being troubled with and want change in their lives.
All of these have one or more of the common themes, namely human needs of relieving pain/suffering, seeking pleasure and meaning of life. It is all about seeking solution to resolve one’s itch and live life with purpose consciously.
People start with the feeling of lacking in something and by acquiring some knowhow and follow up action, they hope to, get rid of their shortcomings.
Some of the better known Self Help Books are:
167 AD Meditations – Marcus Aurelius
1859 Self-help – Samuel Smiles
1936 How To Win Friends and Influence People – Dale Carnegie
1990 The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People – Stephen Covey
1995 Emotional Intelligence – Daniel Goleman
1996 Personal Power II: The Driving Force – Anthony Robbins
There are a lot of people out there more than willing to help you change, for a price, of course. Millions of consumers are willing to buy these products and services for quick-fix solutions.
The pattern of our thinking and behaviour usually take the following path. We need to attend a seminar, listen to a guru, or read a book before taking any action.
Did you know that self-help is a $10 billion-a-year industry?
How do we distinguish whether we have actually learned anything by acquiring more knowledge?
Someone might be able to show you the way, but you have to make the journey yourself.
Change is simple. You decide what you want to change, you find a strategy that will facilitate the change, and then you commit yourself to making that change.
Humans are creatures of Habit because it’s evolutionarily beneficial to form habits. A habit is something we do regularly without consciously thinking much about it. Habits make it possible for us to do things, like driving a car, without spending exorbitant mental effort. We connect positive feelings with familiarity and how familiarity is gained. With time, these habits become our routines and rituals without us even consciously aware of it. They make everyday life possible – for good or bad.
Anthony Robbins, Self development Guru, highlighted that all humans have different desires, but they are driven by the exact same needs.
- certainty/comfort
- uncertainty/variety
- significance
- connnection/love
- growth
- contribution
As a rule, humans prefer certainty to uncertainty. Studies have shown that people would rather definitely get an electric shock now than maybe be shocked later, and show greater nervous-system activation when waiting for an unpredictable shock (or other unpleasant stimulus) than an expected one. Where people differ is in the degree to which uncertainty bothers them.
One of the downsides of the mostly awesome phenomenon of human consciousness is the ability to worry about the future. We know the future exists, but we don’t know what’s going to happen in it.
Personal Growth is associated with sheer hardwork, unpredictability or uncertainty of final outcome. Change is uncomfortable. It is not easy. In fact, it is downright difficult. That’s why most people don’t change and it is also the reason that self-help industry is so robust.
There are many obstacles that stand in the way of change, ranging from emotional baggage and ingrained habits to an environment that reinforces the status quo and is hostile to change.
And, contrary to the assertions of just about every self-help advice, change takes incredible commitment, time, energy, and effort.
Our ability to achieve our goals depends on whether we can change the way we think, feel, and behave in ways that will encourage the pursuit of those goals.
“There is no learning without remembering.” ― Socrates
“A little learning is a dangerous thing.” ― Alexander Pope
“You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.” ― Richard Branson
We have to turn the gained knowledge which deals with the particular and the actual into active participation and action. The behavioural patterns and execution should be observable through deliberated decision and action.
“The wise are not learned, the learned are not wise.” – Lao Tze.
Wisdom allows us to see and accept reality as what it is and not what we wish it should be. To be aware of the tendency to believe the ridiculous positivism, that we are always headed toward our desired outcome, each time and every time. To be wise is to pay homage to beauty, truth, grief, the brevity of life, our own mortality, love and the absurdity and mystery of existence.
Here are six key observations of what most people- including many leaders – think about change:
- Most people change just enough to get away from their problems, but not enough to solve them.
- Most people want to change their circumstances to improve their lives instead of changing themselves to improve their circumstances.
- Most people do the same thing the same way and expect different results.
- Most people are willing to change, not because they see the light, but because they feel the heat.
- Most people are unwilling to pay the immediate price of change. Therefore, they do not change, pay the ultimate price.
- Most people see change as a hurtful thing that must be done, instead of a helpful thing that should be done. (Extract from an article entitled “Don’t get left behind” by John C. Maxwell.)
A good example is, you wish to be proficent in swimming freestyle stroke, say at least 50 metres in a pool. You could learn all the techniques of how to do it from your swimming coach or read it from a book, you could not do it right the first time you do it in the water. You need practice, a lot of practice to get your body to float and swim the freestyle stroke. There is no shortcut to the learning process without actually doing it in the swimming pool.
“There are three kinds of people: those that are immovable, those that are movable and those who move” ― Benjamin Franklin
“Between stimulus (from internal and/or external environment one’s in) and response, there is a space.
In that space, is our power to choose our response.
In our response, lies our growth and our freedom.” – Viktor E. frankl
The key to personal growth is to review your response to road blocks or illusion of success i.e Reflection of your mindset. Reflection is a very important habit to integrate into your life.
We love our illusion of acquired knowledge that equates to progress in the change we want and ignore the most important thing – the real deeds and outcomes.
- Is there anything that is bothering you in the mind? It could be resistance to change. The more ambitious your goal, the more chances that you would face with challenges that seem insurmoutable. And you have more reasons to give it up. That can bother you to no end!
- What are the changes you want in your life and how you plan to get there?
- What things you have done recently and how they went? Is it a success or a failure? and why?
Takes full ownership of your endeavour and stop making excuses! - Every day, make it a point to add value in your life, be a producer and not a consumer in whatever you do.
- How you wish to improve the outcome the next time around?
Thomas L. Friedman, a New York Times Op-Ed columnist, writes about foreign affairs, globalization and technology once said in MIT Compton Lecture, about his latest book, “Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations”, on the following:
These accelerations are creating power’s where one of us could put our minds to it – we have or will have the power to actually feed, house, clothe, and educate every person on the planet. We have never been to this intersection before!
An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations
Make 2019, the best transformation of your mind & body and the change you want to happen in your life.
If not now, when?
If not you, who?
If not this, what?
If you wish to join the “The Age of Accelerations” Conversation, online and/ offline, you’re welcomed to do so.
Reuben Ong
Email: reubeno@zestinlife.com