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Personal growth: Moderation as a path to serenity May 1, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development, Goal Setting and Realization.
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A lack of moderation or, more precisely, the presence of excess, in virtually any component of our personal development efforts can turn the positives in our self-improvement into negatives.

Examples:

  • Too much emphasis on meditation can result in a lack of necessary actions needed to achieve goals
  • Too much action, and not enough thought, can produce an undisciplined approach to our plan
  • Over-emphasis of the intellectually abstract can dull our appreciation of the concrete and practical
  • Always insisting on total consistency in our thoughts and actions can make us inflexible
  • Overdoing our search for self-knowledge can make us less empathetic towards others

We are more likely to achieve the results we want if we take a balanced or moderate approach in our efforts towards improvement.

The tendency towards spending too much intellectual and emotional energy (and time) on one particular aspect of our plan or program is often the result of feeling we need to overcompensate for what we perceive to be a negative in a life circumstance, or intellectual and emotional make-up.

Chapter 9 of Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching sheds some light on the negative results stemming from a lack of moderation:

Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people’s approval
and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity. (1)

(1) The Tao Te Ching, as interpreted/translated by Stephen Mitchell, published by HarperPerennial, A Division of HarperCollins Publishers, 1991

Evaluating the programs of personal growth experts April 30, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development, Concept of personal growth.
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As we work on various ways to increase our satisfaction with our life situation, many of us reach a stage where we begin to think more critically or analytically about the concepts and programs offered by those people considered to be experts or authorities in the field of personal development.

If you are at this stage, here are seven questions you might want to consider investigating:

(1) Is the program or basic theory being offered a practical approach to actually improving the areas in your life in which you want to see better results? Or do the suggested principles of the program seem to you to be overly vague and hard to pin down?

(2) Do you agree with the basic principles or underlying assumptions of the improvement program being suggested? Or would you have to “force” yourself to act on these principles without really believing in them?

(3) Do the personal improvement techniques being suggested by the expert depend for success on a faith-based or religious set of operating principles? If so, can you accept these principles?

(4) Does the expert’s public personal life-behaviour history reflect the principles outlined in their theories? If not, can you still follow and try to implement the ideas of this expert, despite this inconsistency?

(5) In the case of personal growth experts discussing mental health from a medical perspective and offering advice, do they have the necessary medical educational credentials to warrant them being considered an authority?

(6) Is the program or plan easy to understand with straightforward implementation steps? Is the program believable in its claims?

(7) Do the theories, concepts, and ideas expressed by the authority/expert mesh with your own value system?

Finally, it can be helpful to find out what other people think of the ideas offered by the expert you are considering following. One of the ways to discover this is by looking for third-party unbiased online reviews, criticism and articles about the expert and their personal growth informational materials.