Personal growth: Making your creative talent accessible May 10, 2014
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal growth, Overcoming Fear.Tags: achieving goals, creative talent, Emily Dickinson, originality, personal development, personal growth, philosophy, self-improvement
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If you are planning to include an imaginative component in your self-improvement program, such as creative writing, you may want to consider “going public” with your output, rather than keeping your originality to yourself.
If your creative talent (writing, painting, or other artistic pursuit) is something that you want to engage in primarily for personal therapeutic purposes (as with journaling, for example) there can be valid reasons why you don’t want the public to see your work.
However if you are seeking greater self-actualization or self-realization through your creative talent and feel you have “something to say” that other people could benefit from, then reaching a larger public could be helpful to both you and your audience. Showing other people your creative work can be part of your process of individuation.
Until relatively recently however reaching a public market in the creative sphere was largely controlled by gatekeepers in the “art world” and the publishing industry, to give two examples.
Now however, with free platforms for expressing your creativity, such as wordpress.com, you can have a blog to publish and distribute your creative content.
This does take some courage, however, and a willingness to accept whatever the public reaction might be to your work. But the effort to reach an audience with your originality could ultimately be inwardly rewarding and thereby be a significant accomplishment in your personal growth program
There is an old aphorism that there is nothing sadder than for a person to go through their entire life not letting their talents shine, and then “dying with their music still inside them.”
This is essentially what happened with the American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) who, for various reasons, kept the vast majority of her 1,800 poems hidden in her bedroom. Only a handful of her poems were published during her lifetime. The remainder were published after her death.
So, she never got the satisfaction of reaching the public with her originality, nor could the public at that time benefit from her creative efforts. Dickinson is now recognized as one of America’s most outstanding and unique poetic voices
Personal growth and the fear of failure paradigm May 6, 2014
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development, Fear and Anxiety.Tags: achieving goals, fear of failure, overcoming anxiety, personal development, personal growth, philosophy, self-improvement, Seth Godin, visualization
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Paradoxically, one of the main reasons we may feel the need to start a program of personal growth and development can also be a factor in why we find it difficult to make progress.
Namely, fear of failure.
We are afraid or anxious about trying new approaches to solving life-situation problems because we fear that we might not be as successful as we need to be in our efforts. And so, we may turn to the concept of personal growth for help.
And yet, even though we intellectually see the need in our lives for a systematic approach to self-improvement, on an emotional level we avoid making the full commitment to our program in the fear that it might not turn out well.
Much has been written about how we can reduce or eliminate fear of failure in our lives.
However, it’s difficult to “will” a strong emotion, such as anxiety or fear out of our minds.
Perhaps what we need to do is recognize our anxiety, understand the fear of failure motivating it, and then do what we need to do regardless of, or in spite of, our anxiety.
At the same time, it could also be productive to make an effort to anticipate positive outcomes in our minds with the challenges we are facing.
Seth Godin succinctly describes the paradigm of fear and success in relation to completing or shipping personal projects:
“I define non-clinical anxiety as, ‘experiencing failure in advance.’ If you’re busy enacting a future that hasn’t happened yet, and amplifying the worst possible outcomes, it’s no wonder it’s difficult to ship that work.” (1)
As we continue to work on our program, and start to accomplish goals in spite of our fears, we may well become more confident in our ability to make continued progress in our overall personal growth.
(1) You can read more from Seth Godin on his blog at the following URL:
Personal Development Ideas 