Personal growth: Fear, doing, and confidence November 13, 2017
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Fear and Anxiety.Tags: achieving goals, life, negative thinking, philosophy, Ray Bradbury, self-actualization, self-improvement, writing
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Trying something new often stimulates a fear component which can immobilize us, whether it is in our self-actualization and self-improvement program, or something simply related to daily living.
The fear of doing something can be minor, or it can be overwhelming, depending on both our confidence level, and the magnitude of what we are attempting.
In our minds we can up with an assortment of reasons why we should (a) postpone doing what we are contemplating, or (b) completely retreat, deciding to not do anything.
The key reason that we often hesitate or pull back is that we might we might fail.
The writer Ray Bradbury has advised us to jump off the cliff (of doing) and to build our wings on the way down.
We will usually be pleasantly surprised to realize that we can fly.
— Dennis Mellersh
Personal growth concept: Are we less optimistic as we age? November 1, 2017
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal growth.Tags: achieving goals, life, optimism, personal development potential, pessimism, philosophy, psychology, writing
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Are young people by nature optimistic, cheerful, upbeat, and assured, whereas older people are inevitably pessimistic, gloomy, despairing, resigned, and worried?
Although some people seem to be naturally pessimistic or optimistic, for most of us our emotional outlook will vary with our real-time circumstances and how we treat the present moment and our present overall stage in life.
When we are young, life seems like a super-highway, with no speed limits and many off-ramps to significant opportunities. At this stage of our growth all things seem possible. There is “lots of time” to do most everything.
So, we tend to be broadly speaking, optimistic.
As we grow older, however, and as we see time literally starting to “run-out” we come to the realization that all things are not possible, there is not unlimited potential, because, simply put, we will not have enough time to do them all.
At this life-stage, we can still be upbeat and optimistic about “life” in general, but we now know that we need to establish our priorities on the basis of a time-available-focused algorithm.
In our self-improvement efforts, we do not come easily to realizing, and more important accepting, that life has a stop-sign.
— Dennis Mellersh
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