Personal Development Ideas

Personal development: Leveraging the power of repetition October 15, 2018

If you’re like me, and you read, watch, and listen-to a variety of personal growth materials created by various contemporary self-improvement experts, you may find yourself thinking, “something about this sounds very familiar.”

That’s because it is. You have likely experienced the core concepts of the material earlier in a different form.

While every epoch believes it is doing something radically new, the basic concepts or underlying premises of self-actualization-focused writing have not changed much over the centuries.

From Marcus Aurelius to Ted Talks,  the overriding purpose of personal growth media is to help us to realize our full potential.

The basic message hasn’t changed.

What has changed over time is the constantly evolving technology surrounding all of us, and therefore, changing with that technology is the jargon, terminology, ideas, and concepts used to help us achieve our personal growth goals.

For example, the internal, and sometimes self-induced difficulties we encounter and struggle with in trying to move forward in our intellectual, emotional and creative efforts can encompass a wide range of contributing factors, including fear and anxiety, emotional fatigue, anxiety-based procrastination, and many more, all of which result in creative and productive inertia.

Other than being wrongly identified as laziness, there really wasn’t a particular, accurate name to describe this overall condition, until recently when Steven Pressfield, in his book The War of Art, identified the true workings of this collective blocking paradigm, described it as the resistance, and wrote about ways to help us to escape from it.

In the world of the exploration of the human condition, there really is nothing new, but the best contemporary personal growth writers and communicators have figured out how to convey to us and bring to life universal truths with contemporary references and examples we can readily relate to

It’s all useful, both the old and the new, and most of us need the repetition we get from exploring widely in different eras and strata of ideas in order for the messages to sink in and really take root.

Dennis Mellersh