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When to start planning your personal growth program May 8, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development, Goal Setting and Realization.
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When we first begin to get involved in the concept of self-improvement, the temptation is to immediately start developing formal plan.

This can be a mistake; or at least, premature.

The quest for a plan assumes that, of all the plans or templates available, one is as good as another.

Or the assumption is that a particular standardized approach to self-improvement will work for each of us equally well.

However, we need to remember that we each have different personalities, different lifestyles, and different life situations.

That being the case, a “cookie-cutter” program plan or template (one size fits all) is not likely to maximize our potential in our search for betterment in our lives.

Before we can adopt a plan that will truly meet our needs as distinct individuals, we need to study and absorb a lot of information from a variety of sources and experts on personal growth.

We need to increase our self-knowledge and self-awareness as to which aspects of the discipline of personal growth we need to pay the most attention to.

Once we have an idea of what our real needs are, once we have prioritized what aspects we should focus on, then we can better develop a personalized plan that will have a realistic chance of meeting our goals and objectives for improvement.

As with any effort towards tackling a complex problem, we need to first do the research and only then set down a step-by-step approach for achieving solutions.

Personal growth: Moderation as a path to serenity May 1, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development, Goal Setting and Realization.
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A lack of moderation or, more precisely, the presence of excess, in virtually any component of our personal development efforts can turn the positives in our self-improvement into negatives.

Examples:

  • Too much emphasis on meditation can result in a lack of necessary actions needed to achieve goals
  • Too much action, and not enough thought, can produce an undisciplined approach to our plan
  • Over-emphasis of the intellectually abstract can dull our appreciation of the concrete and practical
  • Always insisting on total consistency in our thoughts and actions can make us inflexible
  • Overdoing our search for self-knowledge can make us less empathetic towards others

We are more likely to achieve the results we want if we take a balanced or moderate approach in our efforts towards improvement.

The tendency towards spending too much intellectual and emotional energy (and time) on one particular aspect of our plan or program is often the result of feeling we need to overcompensate for what we perceive to be a negative in a life circumstance, or intellectual and emotional make-up.

Chapter 9 of Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching sheds some light on the negative results stemming from a lack of moderation:

Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people’s approval
and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity. (1)

(1) The Tao Te Ching, as interpreted/translated by Stephen Mitchell, published by HarperPerennial, A Division of HarperCollins Publishers, 1991