Personal Development Potential

Taking ownership of your personal growth program May 3, 2014

In our self-improvement work it’s important for us to set standards for measuring our progress.

And, as we learn more about ourselves through our self-directed program, our increased self-awareness and self-knowledge will help us to set realistic measurement posts for gauging our success.

But, even more important, it’s vital to establish these standards as our own individual and personal “measurement-markers” or guidelines for evaluating our achievements.

We should not allow our satisfaction with our progress to depend on the standards and/or approval mechanisms of others.

To allow the validation of our internal work to be dependent on external approval sources significantly reduces our ownership of what should be a highly personal undertaking.

And, worse, caring too much about external approval or seeking validation through external sources can become a dependency – a dependency which can erode our self-esteem.

We all want to be noticed; we all want to be respected; we all want to be appreciated; but in the case of approval or validation, the most important thing is that we approve of ourselves.

Genuine self-esteem is, above all, an internally-grounded attribute.