Personal growth: Imitating Thoreau’s self-sufficiency ideas April 8, 2018
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in personal development ideas.Tags: Henry David Thoreau, inspiration, life, personal development ideas, personal development potential, philosophy, pysychology, self-actualization, self-improvement, Walden, writing
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It could be an interesting intellectual and emotional experiment in the realm of self-actualization ideas to see if we could imitate, in our mentally-oriented personal growth programs, the physically focussed two-year experiment of Henry David Thoreau who in 1845, built his own home in the woods near Walden Pond, living alone, close to nature, a mile from his nearest neighbour.
His goal was to live with the greatest self-sufficiency and simplicity as possible, depending as much as was practicable on no-one but himself.
What it would be like to duplicate this process in our minds by giving up all contact with the self-actualization information world for a period of, say, two months?
No mental uploading of any personal development media whatsoever…
… a vacation from the constantly increasing flow of self-help information and opinions competing for our attention.
A chance to live by our own mental, spiritual, and emotional resources.
But, feeling the need to always keep up to date with the self-help universe can sometimes seem like an addiction, the pull is so strong.
Perhaps we’d need to try this by starting with one week’s abstinence…or one day.
Dennis Mellersh
Personal growth: Omitting the key ingredient in self-help April 8, 2018
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in personal development ideas.Tags: achieving goals, focussing, life, limits of affirmations, personal development ideas, personal development potential, philosophy, psychology, self-actualization, writing
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If we aren’t careful in how we go about implementing the personal development ideas we admire, we can end up spending so much time planning, researching, reading, or watching videos, that we lose focus on the need for concrete initiative — taking actions to reach our goals.
We may, for example, make affirmations about a goal or a personal characteristic which we want to develop instead of taking, for example, even one small action step each day towards achieving that particular goal.
An old Chinese adage states, “Talk does not cook rice.”
Yet often we may do the equivalent of talking about cooking rice, by extensively studying self-actualization materials, but then postpone the actualization part of the equation, the action component.
Absorbing information, but not-doing is a comfortable and easy trap that any of us can fall into, a trap that can make our self-improvement efforts an illusion instead of a reality.
Theory + Action by Self = Actualization
Dennis Mellersh
Personal Development Ideas 