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Personal growth: Can we avoid wandering in the wilderness? March 21, 2017

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Personal Development Potential.
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By Dennis Mellersh

There will not be much use in our pursuing programs of personal development and self-improvement unless it is actually possible to change our deeply ingrained attitudes and beliefs, and our behaviours stemming from those attitudes and beliefs.

The way we perceive ourselves clearly has a profound influence on how we deal with challenges and potential opportunities.

For example, are we generally looking forward with confidence and optimism, or are we fearful and full of doubt that the future will be positive?

A philosopher I read some time ago suggested that the real reason the Israelites and Moses had to wander in the desert for 40 years before entering the Promised Land is that there had to be a waiting period for the slave generation to die off.

The slave generation, in this view, was supposedly so ingrained to taking orders and doing the bidding of others that its members would be incapable of having the initiative to take charge of their own destiny and to develop and flourish in the Promised Land.

If that view of human nature is only even partially correct, and if we look at our own self-actualization programs and goals as a “promised land”, then most of us have considerable internal work to do to overcome the potential inertia of the limiting basic beliefs we have about ourselves.

Personal development: Does multi-tasking have a downside? March 17, 2017

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Goal Setting and Realization.
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By Dennis Mellersh

In seeking to accelerate our progress towards reaching our potential through personal growth programs and their associated practices, we may be tempted to turn to multi-tasking as a solution.

But when the concept of multi-tasking is applied incorrectly then it is not necessarily an effective choice.

Multi-tasking will generally be counter-productive if it is viewed, for example,  as having a big to-do list for the day and constantly jumping from one task to another, thus giving us the feeling that we are accomplishing a lot.

Unfortunately we are more likely to be doing our tasks less efficiently than if we tackled them one by one and focused on each of them separately until they are completed.

It’s hard to focus on two things at once and expect fully productive results.

It’s like the habit many of us have of reading a book, the newspaper, or a magazine, for instance, while we are eating.

We don’t get the same reward from either enjoying our food, or appreciating what we are reading, than if we did both tasks separately.