Personal growth: The self-destruction of approval-seeking March 24, 2017
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal growth.Tags: life, personal development, personal improvement, philosophy, self-destruction, self-improvement, self-sabotage
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By Dennis Mellersh
Our efforts to better ourselves through self-assessment and subsequent self-improvement actions can be self-sabotaged by various forms of seemingly minor, harmless forms of approval-seeking.
The psychological damage or self-sabotage to occurs because some forms of approval-seeking can take us away from acting or speaking in our own authentic voice, especially in creative work.
When we mold ourselves and our work, even in small ways, to fit the parameters of what we think others will want and accept, we lose.
And, on top of eroding our own personal convictions and values, approval-seeking generally does not work.
Those we seek to attract can sense when what we are presenting is insincere and inauthentic.
Better, when we are starting out, for example, to have a dedicated fan base of 100 for work we really believe in than to initially attract thousands only to lose them when they realize our work is not much different from that of everyone else.
And even if we were able to build and sustain a large following based on personal inauthenticity, doing so would not be satisfying.
Our most rewarding successes come when we are true to ourselves.
Self-actualization: Fantasy and dreams versus reality March 23, 2017
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal growth.Tags: achieving goals, fantasy, inspiration, life, personal development, philosophy, self-actualization
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By Dennis Mellersh
Within our internal world of personal growth and self-improvement ambitions there is a danger of fantasising about our goals instead of taking immediate steps to achieve them.
When we are younger, our brains seem to be hard-wired to be unable to really come to grips with our mortality, to recognize the limited time we have to accomplish our dreams.
The result of thinking, probably subconsciously, that “there is plenty of time” to do everything we want is that we may tend to dream about or imagine achieving our goals at some vague point in the future , rather than actually working on them today.
* If we want to be an artist who paints successful pictures, we need to spend time now developing the required skill-set and then actually start painting
* If we want to own and run our own business, we need to acquire, starting right now, the necessary grounding in understanding how business works
* If we want to be a writer, we need to start learning the craft today, not tomorrow, and start writing something as often as possible, ideally every day
Thinking about a dream and imagining its achievement, if overdone, can end up being a substitute for actually achieving the dream.
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