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Personal growth: Making your creative talent accessible May 10, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal growth, Overcoming Fear.
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If you are planning to include an imaginative component in your self-improvement program, such as creative writing, you may want to consider “going public” with your output, rather than keeping your originality to yourself.

If your creative talent (writing, painting, or other artistic pursuit) is something that you want to engage in primarily for personal therapeutic purposes (as with journaling, for example) there can be valid reasons why you don’t want the public to see your work.

However if you are seeking greater self-actualization or self-realization through your creative talent and feel you have “something to say” that other people could benefit from, then reaching a larger public could be helpful to both you and your audience. Showing other people your creative work can be part of your process of individuation.

Until relatively recently however reaching a public market in the creative sphere was largely controlled by gatekeepers in the “art world” and the publishing industry, to give two examples.

Now however, with free platforms for expressing your creativity, such as wordpress.com, you can have a blog to publish and distribute your creative content.

This does take some courage, however, and a willingness to accept whatever the public reaction might be to your work. But the effort to reach an audience with your originality could ultimately be inwardly rewarding and thereby be a significant accomplishment in your personal growth program

There is an old aphorism that there is nothing sadder than for a person to go through their entire life not letting their talents shine, and then “dying with their music still inside them.”

This is essentially what happened with the American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) who, for various reasons, kept the vast majority of her 1,800 poems hidden in her bedroom. Only a handful of her poems were published during her lifetime. The remainder were published after her death.

So, she never got the satisfaction of reaching the public with her originality, nor could the public at that time benefit from her creative efforts. Dickinson is now recognized as one of America’s most outstanding and unique poetic voices

Personal growth: Having faith in our innate abilities May 9, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development, Self-Esteem.
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One of the key outcomes we seek in a program of personal growth and development is that of acquiring the ability to have faith in our own capabilities and potential.

In terms of self-awareness and self-knowledge, we want to achieve greater self-confidence, and greater self-assurance regarding the creativity, originality, and validity of our own individual thought process.

And, as a large component of our work on developing this confidence, we turn to the experts on personal growth.

What do they have to say about how we should move forward?

We can, however, become over-reliant on the experts to the point where we begin to doubt our own abilities to make decisions about the strategic path we need to take in constructing a self-improvement program tailored to our individual circumstances and needs.

There is reluctance to believe we can absorb the advice of the experts, and yet have the confidence to design a self-directed growth program based on selecting the appropriate (to our personality) component elements suggested by those experts.

And so, because of these inner doubts we may choose to follow a particular program in its entirety without making the necessary adjustments our specific situation may require.

Combatting this reluctance to trust ourselves will take some serious work, because it is rooted in our inborn sense of insecurity.

Eric Hoffer has commented on this conundrum:

“We have more faith in what we imitate than in what we originate. We cannot derive a sense of absolute certitude from anything which has its roots in us. The most poignant sense of insecurity comes from standing alone; we are not alone when we imitate.” (1)

(1) Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind