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How to learn and benefit from a personal growth book May 2, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Personal Growth Books, Planning.
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Reading and gaining useful ideas from a book about self-improvement should be approached as an educational study project.

You are looking for practical information that will help you in your goal of making your life better so you need to retain the details in a systematic, planned way if the book is to benefit you.

Here are some steps you might want to consider:

First: Read through it once quickly. This will give you a feel for whether the book has a lot of applicable ideas and concepts, or if it is primarily an inspirational book, or, if unfortunately, the book is shallow with little in-depth material to offer in helping you achieve your goals.

If you start studying the book diligently right away, making notes as you go on your first reading, you could be wasting a lot of time if the book turns out to have little practical self-help information.

Second: Read the book again more slowly, putting check marks in pencil beside passages that you believe offer effective practical concepts or techniques that can help you emotionally and/or intellectually with your self-improvement program. Don’t underline or highlight all of these ideas right now, just check different interesting points lightly with a pencil. (1)

Third: Leave the book aside for a day or two, then come back to it reading the check-marked passages and decide which of these you would like to highlight or take notes on. By leaving the book for a period of time you will be more objective when you return to it. On first reading, if the book has a lot of ideas on how to improve your life, you will be tempted to underline or highlight too much of it.

Fourth: Now that you have selected the most pertinent ideas, tips, concepts, or solutions to help you with making improvements in various areas of your life, write out the ones you consider to be the most helpful for your particular life situation.

Fifth: Assuming you have already made a plan and established goals for your personal growth program, decide how you will incorporate the ideas you have selected from your book into your overall plan and list of goals/objectives.

This approach can be adapted or modified for studying other self-improvement media such as videos, DVD’s, podcasts, websites and blogs.

The main idea is the same: review the material at the outset to decide if it is worth further study; then by a process of reduction and selection, decide on the information you consider important and make notes on that content.

Finally, whether our goals are increased self-knowledge and awareness, or developing skills such as managing our emotions and attitudes, we can all get over-absorbed in the studying component of personal growth and development.

We need to make sure that we also take steps to implement the ideas we are discovering in our studying.

(1) Marking the book with underlining or a highlighter, or pen or pencil, assumes that you own the book.

Evaluating the programs of personal growth experts April 30, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development, Concept of personal growth.
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As we work on various ways to increase our satisfaction with our life situation, many of us reach a stage where we begin to think more critically or analytically about the concepts and programs offered by those people considered to be experts or authorities in the field of personal development.

If you are at this stage, here are seven questions you might want to consider investigating:

(1) Is the program or basic theory being offered a practical approach to actually improving the areas in your life in which you want to see better results? Or do the suggested principles of the program seem to you to be overly vague and hard to pin down?

(2) Do you agree with the basic principles or underlying assumptions of the improvement program being suggested? Or would you have to “force” yourself to act on these principles without really believing in them?

(3) Do the personal improvement techniques being suggested by the expert depend for success on a faith-based or religious set of operating principles? If so, can you accept these principles?

(4) Does the expert’s public personal life-behaviour history reflect the principles outlined in their theories? If not, can you still follow and try to implement the ideas of this expert, despite this inconsistency?

(5) In the case of personal growth experts discussing mental health from a medical perspective and offering advice, do they have the necessary medical educational credentials to warrant them being considered an authority?

(6) Is the program or plan easy to understand with straightforward implementation steps? Is the program believable in its claims?

(7) Do the theories, concepts, and ideas expressed by the authority/expert mesh with your own value system?

Finally, it can be helpful to find out what other people think of the ideas offered by the expert you are considering following. One of the ways to discover this is by looking for third-party unbiased online reviews, criticism and articles about the expert and their personal growth informational materials.