Personal development: Deciding on your goals strategy March 22, 2014
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Goal Setting and Realization, Leaders in Personal Development.Tags: achieving goals, goal setting, goal visualization, personal development, personal growth, personal improvement, Stephen Covey, time management
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In strategizing our personal growth programs, planning and achieving our goals is clearly an important priority. It’s also a procedure that should be tailored to our individual personality characteristics.
The establishment and execution of our self-improvement goals is not usually a procedure in which one formula or strategy fits all situations, or more importantly, all personalities.
By definition, the concept of personal development is just that – personal; it’s individual. If we fight against the basic nature of our individual ingrained approaches to life, and try to institute an approach or method that is not complimentary, failure in achieving our overall objectives will be a strong possibility.
As Stephen Covey comments in his book First Things First, “Self-awareness prompts us to start where we are – no illusions, no excuses, and helps us to set realistic goals…the ability to set goals that are both realistic and challenging goes a long way to empowering us to create peace and positive growth in our lives.”
If you look at goal planning and execution as a decision process, we are faced with the contradiction between the two maxims:
(1) Look before you leap
(2) He who hesitates is lost
If you are a person who usually carefully plans all of your activities, then (1) would be your inclination.
If you like to do a minimum of planning and “get right into things” then your approach is (2).
The trick is in recognizing those occasions when you may need to adapt your approach and either do more planning, or less planning.
If you base your approach for your goals strategy on someone else’s opinion or personal approach, such as an author writing on “How to achieve Your Goals,” and do not adapt the strategy to your own personality and circumstances, frustration and possible abandonment of your goal(s) could be the result.
Personal time management consultant Alan Lakein recognizes this when discussing how to apply his ideas, such as suggestions on developing a goals strategy, in his book How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life.
In advising readers, he says, “Pick and choose among the ideas. Recognize that different techniques work for different people, and that there are times when good advice for one person is useless for another. Select the ideas that will benefit you the most, and use them to help you lead a more enjoyable and satisfying life.”
Concept of personal development: Our inner and outer lives March 21, 2014
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development.Tags: Car Jung, Dreams, Memories, personal development, personal development potential, personal growth, Reflections, self-improvement
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As we work on our individual programs of personal growth and self-improvement we soon realize that there are two major components involved in our efforts to realize or maximize our human potential.
These two factors are the inner work required and the outward manifestations of this work.
We come to understand that we will not achieve genuine personal growth such as growing intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, if all we do is the outward, without changing our core being or inner consciousness.
While it is true that deeds speak, we are not being honest with ourselves if we enact principles outwardly, but do not embed our principles as an essential foundation for the growth of our inner or core consciousness.
For example, we are short-changing ourselves in terms of real growth, if our program results in many acts of kindness, tolerance, and acceptance, but inside we still harbor feelings of resentment towards any group of people. Unless we truly feel compassion for the circumstances of others, we cannot with honesty say we are compassionate.
However, changing our core consciousness is truly difficult and challenging work.
Yet, our personal development will only make true progress if we do the work intellectually and spiritually on our thinking, on our attitudes, and on our beliefs. To do the external deeds without doing the inner change-work is to remain ultimately unfulfilled in our personal growth efforts.
What prompted my thinking on this was my reaction to reading Carl Jung’s autobiographical book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. This was written/compiled while Jung was more than 80 years old and was therefore looking back on his entire life.
I would like to share some excerpts with you. In the prologue to this work, Jung says:
“Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. [the underground root structure of a plant] Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lives only a single summer. Then it withers away – an ephemeral apparition…I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The Rhizome remains…I can understand myself only in the light of inner happenings. It is these that make up the singularity of my life, and with these my autobiography deals.”
In terms of the concept of personal development, we might extrapolate from Jung’s words that our outward accomplishments, either in the world of things or deeds, is “ephemeral” and constantly changing, but our inner accomplishments – our intellectual, spiritual, and emotional growth, and our principles – are the ongoing guiding constant; the rhizome.
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