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Personal Development: “Cocooning in a new decade” November 22, 2020

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development, Concept of personal growth, Uncategorized.
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Cocooning is a concept coined by social philosopher and futurist Faith Popcorn in the late 1970s, which described the idea of spending more and more time at home as a refuge from the noise/disruptions  of the outside world.

In her book The Popcorn Report (1), published in 1991, she said “cocooning…when we named it, [was] “the impulse to go inside when it just gets too tough and scary outside. To pull a shell of safety around yourself, so you’re not at the mercy of a mean, unpredictable world…”

“Cocooning turned into a major preoccupation, as record numbers of people remodeled, redecorated, restored, and then watched, “This Old House” to relax.”

But, all of this was nevertheless a choice; we made the decision to go inside, to cocoon.

It was part of an enjoyable lifestyle.

But now in 2020-21, and perhaps beyond, pushed inside by a relentless Covid-19 virus and mandated sheltering, we are in the midst of an emotional and physical health crisis.

Instead of comfort reading, we are more likely to be reading personal development and personal growth books on coping with anxiety, or working on reading or writing job-related reports on the kitchen table because we have been forced to work remotely from our homes.

But hopefully, in part by utilizing the coping tools we have learned, and by  community efforts and working together, we will emerge from this stronger and have more of an attitude of gratitude and appreciation for what is good in our lives.

(1) Faith Popcorn, The Popcorn Report, Doubleday Currency, New York, 1991

 

Dennis Mellersh

 

Personal development: Leveraging the power of repetition October 15, 2018

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development.
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If you’re like me, and you read, watch, and listen-to a variety of personal growth materials created by various contemporary self-improvement experts, you may find yourself thinking, “something about this sounds very familiar.”

That’s because it is. You have likely experienced the core concepts of the material earlier in a different form.

While every epoch believes it is doing something radically new, the basic concepts or underlying premises of self-actualization-focused writing have not changed much over the centuries.

From Marcus Aurelius to Ted Talks,  the overriding purpose of personal growth media is to help us to realize our full potential.

The basic message hasn’t changed.

What has changed over time is the constantly evolving technology surrounding all of us, and therefore, changing with that technology is the jargon, terminology, ideas, and concepts used to help us achieve our personal growth goals.

For example, the internal, and sometimes self-induced difficulties we encounter and struggle with in trying to move forward in our intellectual, emotional and creative efforts can encompass a wide range of contributing factors, including fear and anxiety, emotional fatigue, anxiety-based procrastination, and many more, all of which result in creative and productive inertia.

Other than being wrongly identified as laziness, there really wasn’t a particular, accurate name to describe this overall condition, until recently when Steven Pressfield, in his book The War of Art, identified the true workings of this collective blocking paradigm, described it as the resistance, and wrote about ways to help us to escape from it.

In the world of the exploration of the human condition, there really is nothing new, but the best contemporary personal growth writers and communicators have figured out how to convey to us and bring to life universal truths with contemporary references and examples we can readily relate to

It’s all useful, both the old and the new, and most of us need the repetition we get from exploring widely in different eras and strata of ideas in order for the messages to sink in and really take root.

Dennis Mellersh