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Personal development idea: Setting limits on our expectations April 16, 2018

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in personal development ideas.
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When any of us are tempted to jump onto/into the latest self-help system for achieving our goals, we might want to bear in mind a phrase that advertisers of certain products and services sometimes use in the “small print” of their promotional material; a phrase  designed to provide to cover in case of consumer dissatisfaction.

The phrase, or one with equivalent meaning, is often used with products, systems, and services involving generic experiences of users or testimonials involving actual people who have successfully used the product, system, or service.

The phrase, or one like it, is of course…”your experience may differ.”

In the world of self-actualization effort, it’s natural to want to try the latest thing on offer, just like an artist wanting to try out a new line of paints, brushes, or drawing materials.

It just that we need to mentally give ourselves a “small print” warning that when we try something new after being convinced by the promotional material…

“Results shown are not typical. Your experience may differ.”

It’s also a heads-up that we should not be too hard on ourselves whenever we try something new in self-improvement and the results are less than we anticipated.

Dennis Mellersh

Personal growth: Is everyone reading self-help books these days? April 13, 2018

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in personal development ideas.
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I was recently reading a newspaper interview of a novelist, and one of the questions was, “What is the latest self-help book you have read?”, which struck me as significant because it implies or assumes that everyone is reading self-help books as part of their regular routine.

And maybe it’s true: I just got a personal development book, The Happiness Equation, out of the library a few days before I read the article.

The question we might ask, however, is that with all the self-improvement material we have already read, how much more advice do we really need to manage our lives effectively?

I suspect that most of us actually don’t need more information in order to know what we need to do; it’s more a matter of inserting an action component into our existing knowledge, and then taking concrete “do” steps towards our goals.

I tend to think that many of us read books about self-actualization, listen to podcasts on the topic, and watch videos with similar content, because we enjoy reading about the topic as a form of lifestyle philosophy, much as we might like reading mystery novels, or adventure stories.

Maybe we don’t actually need as much life-guidance as the abundance of personal development books might seem to indicate.

Maybe we’re all OK just as we are.

Dennis Mellersh