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Including personal growth actions on your to-do list June 17, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal growth, Goal Setting and Realization.
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Our goal of implementing a general self-improvement program will probably remain an unfulfilled intention unless we make specific personal development tasks an integral part of our daily to do list.

This can be done in either of two ways:

(1) Making a standing list of program elements that we will do every day

(2) Including one of more elements of our program on our normal activity-driven daily to-do list

Either one of these approaches will work, although the second can provide more flexibility and allow for fitting in our program according to the circumstances and demands of a particular day.

The reason we need to commit to “doing” an element of our program each day is because of the peculiar nature of self-improvement efforts.

The planning, reading, and other research we do to learn about various aspects of improving our lives can, if we are not careful, end up being a substitute for taking concrete actions to achieve the goals of our program.

It’s something like the old Chinese maxim: “Talk does not cook rice.”

We can plan, we can list goals, we can envisage a better future; but if we are to accomplish anything in our growth we need to “do.”

Having a daily list that includes actions on our program helps ensure that we are taking steps every day towards our overall objectives.

We should also make sure that we prioritize our lists to ensure that the most important aspects of our program receive some action each day.

Personal growth: Thinking, planning, taking action June 11, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal growth, Goal Setting and Realization.
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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.