Personal growth: Omitting the key ingredient in self-help April 8, 2018
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in personal development ideas.Tags: achieving goals, focussing, life, limits of affirmations, personal development ideas, personal development potential, philosophy, psychology, self-actualization, writing
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If we aren’t careful in how we go about implementing the personal development ideas we admire, we can end up spending so much time planning, researching, reading, or watching videos, that we lose focus on the need for concrete initiative — taking actions to reach our goals.
We may, for example, make affirmations about a goal or a personal characteristic which we want to develop instead of taking, for example, even one small action step each day towards achieving that particular goal.
An old Chinese adage states, “Talk does not cook rice.”
Yet often we may do the equivalent of talking about cooking rice, by extensively studying self-actualization materials, but then postpone the actualization part of the equation, the action component.
Absorbing information, but not-doing is a comfortable and easy trap that any of us can fall into, a trap that can make our self-improvement efforts an illusion instead of a reality.
Theory + Action by Self = Actualization
Dennis Mellersh
Personal growth: Why it’s hard for us to focus on “The Now” November 3, 2017
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Living in the Now.Tags: focussing, life, philosophy, psychology, self-actualization, visualization, writing
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Many self-improvement programs emphasize that for better equanimity and peace of mind, we should focus on the present moment; but it’s not easy.
Turns out that the brain of the human species is strongly wired for imagining and planning for the future.
It would be very difficult to build a personal program and plan for self-actualization if we were focused primarily on the present.
An article in the New York Times states, “What best distinguishes our species is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future.”
This intellectual and creative faculty, has enabled us to build civilizations and create smooth running, self-sustaining societies.
On the downside, however, this ability to look ahead is also the source of most of our anxiety and depression, the article states.
Scientists call this ability to think ahead “prospection.”
And prospection is strongly linked to the brain’s memory function.
“[The] link between memory and prospection has emerged in research showing that people with damage to the brain’s medial temporal lobe lose memories of past experiences as well as the ability to construct rich and detailed simulations of the future,” the article reports.
It’s an intriguing article which you may want to read in its entirety.
Here’s a link to it:
Personal Development Ideas 