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Personal growth: Having faith in our innate abilities May 9, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development, Self-Esteem.
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One of the key outcomes we seek in a program of personal growth and development is that of acquiring the ability to have faith in our own capabilities and potential.

In terms of self-awareness and self-knowledge, we want to achieve greater self-confidence, and greater self-assurance regarding the creativity, originality, and validity of our own individual thought process.

And, as a large component of our work on developing this confidence, we turn to the experts on personal growth.

What do they have to say about how we should move forward?

We can, however, become over-reliant on the experts to the point where we begin to doubt our own abilities to make decisions about the strategic path we need to take in constructing a self-improvement program tailored to our individual circumstances and needs.

There is reluctance to believe we can absorb the advice of the experts, and yet have the confidence to design a self-directed growth program based on selecting the appropriate (to our personality) component elements suggested by those experts.

And so, because of these inner doubts we may choose to follow a particular program in its entirety without making the necessary adjustments our specific situation may require.

Combatting this reluctance to trust ourselves will take some serious work, because it is rooted in our inborn sense of insecurity.

Eric Hoffer has commented on this conundrum:

“We have more faith in what we imitate than in what we originate. We cannot derive a sense of absolute certitude from anything which has its roots in us. The most poignant sense of insecurity comes from standing alone; we are not alone when we imitate.” (1)

(1) Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind

When to start planning your personal growth program May 8, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development, Goal Setting and Realization.
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When we first begin to get involved in the concept of self-improvement, the temptation is to immediately start developing formal plan.

This can be a mistake; or at least, premature.

The quest for a plan assumes that, of all the plans or templates available, one is as good as another.

Or the assumption is that a particular standardized approach to self-improvement will work for each of us equally well.

However, we need to remember that we each have different personalities, different lifestyles, and different life situations.

That being the case, a “cookie-cutter” program plan or template (one size fits all) is not likely to maximize our potential in our search for betterment in our lives.

Before we can adopt a plan that will truly meet our needs as distinct individuals, we need to study and absorb a lot of information from a variety of sources and experts on personal growth.

We need to increase our self-knowledge and self-awareness as to which aspects of the discipline of personal growth we need to pay the most attention to.

Once we have an idea of what our real needs are, once we have prioritized what aspects we should focus on, then we can better develop a personalized plan that will have a realistic chance of meeting our goals and objectives for improvement.

As with any effort towards tackling a complex problem, we need to first do the research and only then set down a step-by-step approach for achieving solutions.