Personal growth: Thinking, planning, taking action June 11, 2014
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal growth, Goal Setting and Realization.Tags: achieving goals, goal setting, personal growth action, personal growth planning, philosophy, self-improvement
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In our self-improvement work, there can be a temptation, or more accurately, a tendency, to do a lot of thinking, somewhat less planning, and even less actual action on our overall objective of improving various aspects of our lives.
We enjoy taking in information and advice about personal growth and, in our minds, we plan or envisage what our lives would be like once we implement our “program.”
Envisaging outcomes can be emotionally fulfilling and gratifying, and because of the enjoyment we get from this early stage of engaging ourselves in an improvement program, we can become stuck in that phase and not make much real progress in actually realizing life-change outcomes.
This thinking stage is not necessarily “day-dreaming” but without rigorous planning, concrete results are harder to obtain.
I came across an interesting comment on planning which can offer a way to move from thinking to action:
“It is much better to conceive of planning as ‘writing’ rather than as ‘thinking.’” (1)
The logic of this is that it is more effective and productive to have a precise written plan to execute rather than trying to achieve results by means of thoughts in our minds, which can be vague and less precise than a written plan.
The end-game is taking action on our overall goals, and we can move closer to this objective by having a plan in writing.
(1) This comment was one I wrote in a notebook, but unfortunately neglected to write down the source.
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