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Moderation is the key to success in personal improvement May 3, 2018

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in personal development ideas.
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Sometimes over-zealous work on our personal growth programs can lead to an imbalanced life, whereby we spend so much time and effort on a self-improvement program, or a personal goal within the program, that other important aspects of our lives can suffer from lack of attention.

Our personal growth efforts can actually suffer if we spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to ensure positive results.

Running or jogging, for example, has benefits for improving our health, but these benefits are of little use if we skew the rest of our life out of balance by constantly trying to include more and more running.

Or, we can spend so much time researching and studying personal development that we do not spend enough time on those action steps needed to bring our goals to fruition.

Doing community work to excess can interfere with the time we should be spending with our own family.

As psychologist and self-actualization thinker Carl Jung has observed:

“Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, or morphine, or idealism.”

—Dennis Mellersh

Personal growth: Carl Jung and the “aimlessness” of life November 14, 2017

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal growth.
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Carl Jung (1875-1961), the famed psychologist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst, once noted: “About a third of my cases [patients] are not suffering from any clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and aimlessness of their lives.” (1)

This statement leads us to wonder whether the troubled patients led lives that were: (a) actually aimless and senseless; (b) just perceived to be so by the patients; or (c) a combination of both.

Whatever the cause of the patients’ discomfort, it’s a troubling emotional space for anyone to be in.

Perhaps the patients of Dr. Jung’s most active consulting period would have been better able to cope with many of life’s circumstances if they had been able to access the wide variety of quality self-help materials available to us today through modern media and technology.

We have now come to appreciate that one of the key potential emotional and psychological benefits of involving ourselves in the study and practice of personal development is that we can, in most non-medical instances, develop an improved focus and enhanced sense of purpose and appreciation in our lives.

So, if you’re working on a personal program of improvement and do not feel that you are making enough progress, stop fretting.

You’re probably growing emotionally and intellectually faster than you realize, and are actually better able to cope with life’s inevitable ups and downs better every day.

(1) Neurosis as defined by dictionary.com:  “a relatively mild mental illness that is not caused by organic disease, involving symptoms of stress (depression, anxiety, obsessive behavior, hypochondria) but not a radical loss of touch with reality”

— Dennis Mellersh