jump to navigation

Personal development goals can be frustrated by the ego February 23, 2012

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Ego Management.
Tags: , , , , ,
add a comment

In our quest to understand personal development and thereby improve ourselves through reading and general research, the ego and its role within our personality patterns is something that constantly surfaces.

The more we read about the psychology of self-improvement, self-help and personal development in general, the more definitions and explanations of the ego we will uncover.

Some of the explanations of the role the ego plays in personality and human behaviour are quite complex and technical. Whatever the explanation, however, we know that the ego is a force to be dealt with and our research often leads to us look for answers in how to manage the ego, how to control anger with the ego, in general, how to deal with the ego and its influence on us. We seem to realize intuitively that the ego is a somewhat independent force living within us.

One of the interesting views of the ego is that of Eckhart Tolle, who (and this is a very simplified paraphrasing) regards the ego as the constantly chattering voice in our heads that will not shut up no matter how hard we try to focus and “stay in the moment.” For Tolle, the ego does not like being satisfied, with, or just accepting the present moment, but rather tends to focus on the future or the past.

The ego in this view tends to look at what should be and what should have been, rather than on dealing maturely and objectively with what is.

In his book, The Power of Now, Tolle makes the following observation: “The basic ego patterns are designed to combat its deep-seated fear and sense of lack. They are resistance, control, power, greed, defense, attack. Some of the ego’s strategies are extremely clever, yet they never truly solve any of its problems, simply because the ego itself is the problem.”

In Tolle’s view the ego’s tendency to focus on the past and the future, and to avoid dealing with the present moment, makes us slaves to time with the result that: “The more you are focussed on time – past and future – the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.”

Personal development and You Tube: A platform for self-actualization February 19, 2012

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Leaders in Personal Development.
Tags: , , , , , ,
add a comment

If you look at You Tube’s capabilities carefully, the service is actually, as with some other new communications platforms, a direct and indirect enabling tool for self-realization and numerous additional personal development concepts.

A few  of the personal development principles  actualized by You Tube include: entrepreneurship, getting things done, intention and manifestation, planning, problem solving, productivity, time management, self-education, self-discipline, communication – and the list goes on.

This occurs through direct content such as videos on “how to do” something in arts and crafts, for example, and indirectly through the totality of You Tube’s enablement of people’s ability to communicate in a new way and through its overall effect of  bringing  people into a dynamic self-realization platform.  The longshoreman and philosopher Eric Hoffer, who was self-educated, often expressed a distrust of the “wisdom” of the elites. On the other hand, Hoffer had a great respect for the creative and problem-solving capabilities of the average person. You Tube is a testament to this underlying mass creativity potential.

In addition to a great deal of direct and educationally focussed personal development content being available through the service, such as a video teaching about the attributes of successful people, You Tube is also indirectly enabling a self-improvement and education function simply by exposing people to different things they have not previously experienced. And, people using You Tube are demonstrating that they are very open to these new experiences.

Of course, the intention of an older person posting a video involving some aspect of 1950’s music, was not likely to educate younger people on period music, but simply to put something on You Tube that the poster thought other people might enjoy. Often however, viewers of such videos will often comment that they had not realized how good such music was – in other words, they are learning something new as well as enjoying the music.

Overall, the aggregating effect has a positive impact on personal development for all of us using You Tube. There is also a very real curatorial benefit in preserving and archiving material that might otherwise be eventually lost or forgotten and not readily retrievable. You Tube is thereby serving an important stewardship and custodial purpose as well. This could be viewed as an example of unintended intention and manifestation.

People of different ages, cultural backgrounds, and education accomplishments, are stumbling across various types of media material they are unfamiliar with, and are discovering how good the quality of this material is. If you read the comments section provided with the videos it often shows that people are making real discoveries about topics they previously knew little about.

Both in video posting activity and in interactivity with each other in comments, people of diverse age, economic, cultural, and educational backgrounds are creating a unique global platform for self-realization.  The “You” in You Tube is significant – it is in many ways an interpersonal communications platform.

Presently, the service does not appear to have been bombarded with spam content and, hopefully, You Tube will continue to make strong efforts to curtail spamming activity, and thereby preserve what has become a strong tool for creativity and personal development.