What you need to know if you are serious about Personal Development
Over the past few years I have been pretty active in exploring the world of personal development, specifically in terms of how I can learn more about myself in order to find and discover the life that I believe I am truly here to live. I bet that’s similar to many people, we all encounter times in our lives when school, relationships, career, children and a whole host of other things aren’t quite working our as we expected, and some of us are curious enough to dig a little deeper and try to figure out why this is the case.
In this post I want to highlight just a few things that I have learned about personal development and wish that I knew a few years ago when I first started – hopefully you will not fall into the same traps that I did.
Stop Reading and Listening and take ACTION!
For the first few years I read and listened to any number of resources that I could get my hands on. I read the classics from Tony Robbins, Bob Proctor, Jack Canfield and James Allen and listened to audio books by Steven Covey, Brian Tracy and Robert Kiyosaki. After all this did anything change? Did I notice that I was living a different life? Was I getting everything that I wanted? NO! Sure, I had a head full of ideas and had a few moments whereby I thought “I can relate to exactly what you are saying, I should take your advice” and then something cropped up like needing to cook an evening meal or having to work late. Those good intentions quickly slipped away from the front of my consciousness and were forgotten or put on my To-Do list.
So after committing a lot of time and effort I was no further forward and I was beginning to get a bit frustrated. I had a few weeks off, in fact I went on my honeymoon, and that’s when it hit me – you have to take ACTION. Only you can change your life, all the reading and listening to the worlds gurus isn’t going to change anything until you wake up one day and put their teachings into practice. Think about that for a moment – everything you have read is just a resource, a guide, some best practices and techniques, only YOU can take these resources and use them to change your life.
So on my return I made the conscious decision to take action, the notes I had made whilst reading the books are now becoming part of my daily life, I am trying to make some of them habitual, creating a library of positive things I need to do and think about each day.
On top of that I signed up for a Life Coaching course. In my old theoretical days it was easy to dismiss the notion of attending a night class, what could a local Life Coach teach me that the worlds best couldn’t deliver in a book or on audio? How wrong that assertion was, enrolling in this class has been one of the most positive things I have ever done, here are few reasons why:
- It helps you overcome the fear of the unknown – you put yourself into an unfamiliar place every week with a group of strangers, I’ve found that quite exciting to start with, and then as you get to know the group you want to continue to attend to see and speak to them and hear about their progress.
- The tutor is brilliant, he isn’t a fake, he has real depth of experience and his passion for helping other people is inspiring. He isn’t motivated by money or fame and just wants to teach us how we can put into practice the techniques relevant to us in order to reach our individual goals.
- It is motivating to think from week to week how you are putting into practice the things you learn and then start to notice small changes. As with all of these things, the small steps help you reach that bigger goal.
- You can be specific in the areas of you life that you want to improve, more often than not you can fall into the generic trap of thinking everything is bad in your life. With the help of a tutor you can cut through that and get to specifics, and realise that there are many good things going on and it’s just a few areas that with a little work will complete the whole.
The last few weeks have been very liberating, to deliberately choice to take ACTION has resulted in any number of good things happening and I have a real desire to keep going. I think that this has to be the most important thing for anyone embarking on a personal development journey, I’m not naive enough to think that taking action is common sense to most people, but I know it’s very easy to fall into the trap of expecting things to happen just because you read some best selling books!
Don’t become a self help preacher
This is another thing that I wish I was aware of when I first started, it certainly would have saved me a lot of embarrassment and not hacked off a number of friends and family.
What’s the first thing we want to do when we learn something new? We want to show it off of course! From a young age we are encouraged to show off our skills to impress our friends and family. This is all well and good, but as soon as you cross the line and start projecting your so called skills onto the people around you, you are then asking for trouble.
I know from experience that this is a bad course to follow. On many occasions I have listened to friends tell me about their particular challenges or difficulties and I thought I would do them a favour and give them the benefit of my self help knowledge! How stupid and arrogant can you get? Preaching to your friends and telling them of their faults is a quick fire fire of pissing them off. That isn’t being helpful, if you have sound guidance to give then fine, but constantly preaching how great your life is and that theirs could be to if they followed your path is pompousness at its finest. Be aware of what you are projecting onto others and don’t expect what works for you to work for anyone else. With a few pointers here and there you can let them find their own path without resorting to preaching and alienating those around you.
It can get very expensive if you let it
Last time I searched on amazon.com for the term personal development it returned 52000 hits in the Books category alone! Now that’s a lot of books, at an average price of £6 each that can start to add up if you starting buying a serious number of them. Add to that the cost of seminars and programs such as Silva Life System and you could spend a lot of your hard earned cash in this area.
Lets get one thing straight here – I am not saying that you shouldn’t be paying for learning, motivation and inspiration, just make sure you spend your money wisely and get a sound return on your investment.
We have some fabulous resources listed on this site and only list what we have used ourselves and believe to be best in their field and specific category. On top of that we have free tools such as the Life Energizer System and free book summary’s called Distilled Wisdom.
Like anything, it’s your choice to be responsible for the decisions and purchases that you make, just make sure you totally understand what you a buying and what exactly you are going to get out of it. If you keep attending conferences and seminars and nothing in your life has changed, ask yourself when the email or mailshot for the next one comes through if it would be a good investment to attend it? That’s the nub of it really, you are investing your own money in in yourself, in these times of credit crunch make sure you do it wisely.
Filter out the fluffy feel good rubbish
My last point, and it’s one that I reckon a few people will connect with, there is an awful lot of crap out there that is branded personal development and you need to be aware of it. In my time I’ve read far too much fluff and self help clap trap that has not has a positive impact on me whatsoever. Why would it? It has no substance, nothing that I can embrace or am willing to follow through with to create a positive change.
It’s all very well some well intentioned or otherwise person telling you that you can have whatever you want, that all your dreams are possible, but it’s just not true! As our Life Coach told us the other day, very few of us could ever reach the heights of Tiger Woods or Tom Cruise, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aspire or work towards our dreams, it just means that you need to be rational and practical about them.
Have you fluff filter active at all times in order that you dont waste your precious time and energy focusing on fuzzy, feel food emotions that aren’t going to give you real change in your life. When you find something good, you should seek to apply what you have learnt and continue to do so for a lifetime!
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Nice writing. You are on my RSS reader now so I can read more from you down the road.
Allen Taylor