Personal growth: The permanent vs the non-permanent June 17, 2014
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal growth, Personal Development Potential.Tags: Confucius, personal development, personal growth, philosophy, self-improvement
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In choosing to follow the path of a self-improvement program, you have essentially made the significant and ultimately rewarding choice of a philosophy of living that leans towards the permanent as opposed to the transitory.
This choice can be a strong foundation of inner strength that will act as a buffer when you encounter the inevitable bumps, roadblocks, and detours that inevitably occur throughout an active life.
The values and principles of your program will help to enable you to develop a variety of personal qualities or characteristics that will remain with you regardless of the status of your material world.
Money, employment, and material possessions can come and go; but what is in our hearts and minds – the qualities we strive to foster through realizing our personal development potential – will remain with us.
Qualities such as: generosity, empathy, understanding, tolerance, acceptance, gratitude, patience, moderation, honesty, and eventually, wisdom.
In speaking of the world of impermanent things, the Analects of Confucius offer the following:
“Standing beside a river, the Master said: ‘Everything passes away like this, day and night, never resting.'”(1)
(1) Confucius, The Analects, as translated by David Hinton in his book, The Four Chinese Classics
Including personal growth actions on your to-do list June 17, 2014
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal growth, Goal Setting and Realization.Tags: daily to-do list, getting organized, personal development, personal growth actions, philosophy
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Our goal of implementing a general self-improvement program will probably remain an unfulfilled intention unless we make specific personal development tasks an integral part of our daily to do list.
This can be done in either of two ways:
(1) Making a standing list of program elements that we will do every day
(2) Including one of more elements of our program on our normal activity-driven daily to-do list
Either one of these approaches will work, although the second can provide more flexibility and allow for fitting in our program according to the circumstances and demands of a particular day.
The reason we need to commit to “doing” an element of our program each day is because of the peculiar nature of self-improvement efforts.
The planning, reading, and other research we do to learn about various aspects of improving our lives can, if we are not careful, end up being a substitute for taking concrete actions to achieve the goals of our program.
It’s something like the old Chinese maxim: “Talk does not cook rice.”
We can plan, we can list goals, we can envisage a better future; but if we are to accomplish anything in our growth we need to “do.”
Having a daily list that includes actions on our program helps ensure that we are taking steps every day towards our overall objectives.
We should also make sure that we prioritize our lists to ensure that the most important aspects of our program receive some action each day.
Personal Development Ideas 