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Personal growth: The need for self-tolerance March 6, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Goal Setting and Realization.
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One of the important aspects of moving towards the achievement of our personal development potential is in focusing on the vector of developing mature interpersonal relationships.

This is a multi-faceted area for improvement, and we recognize that one of the important aspects of this component is the need for personal work on the subset of developing the character attribute of tolerance.

In our ongoing self-improvement work we have learned some important value lessons.

We recognize that one aspect of intolerance is the pejorative naming, labelling, and categorizing of people, groups of people, institutions, religions, nationalities, races, sexual orientation, and political views.

We know, for example, that naming, labelling, and categorizing often allows us to over-simplify the complex.

We know that it is both morally wrong, and ultimately unproductive, to be intolerant, bigoted, or judgemental, and we work to correct these tendencies in our own personal makeup.

But how often do we see that there is also need for us, if we are to realize our individual human potential, to be more tolerant towards ourselves in our personal development work?

Personal growth is just that – growth.   By implication, growth is not achieved overnight, it is an evolutionary process. We should not be beating ourselves up constantly for not achieving sufficiently rapid improvement in areas such as attitudinal change. Attitude modification is one of the most challenging components of self-improvement.

We should be more accepting and tolerant of what we consider to be our own, personal attitudinal shortcomings, even as we recognize the need for improving these deficiencies in our intellectual and emotional makeup.

Carried too far, intolerance towards our perceived lack of fast change in our personal behaviours and attitudes can have demoralizing, damaging, and ultimately destructive effects on our efforts to improve.

 

Are you avoiding action in your personal growth program? February 24, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development, Goal Setting and Realization.
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One of the technical dangers in pursuing a program of personal growth or development is that of missing our potential for growth through action by having a bias or imbalance towards studying improvement techniques rather than implementing them.

Personal growth and development materials are one of the genres of self-help or self-education that seem overly conducive to this pattern, compared with other self-instruction areas such as learning how to develop a particular skill, such as playing the guitar.

If we are reading about learning how to develop a practical skill, for example, it will not be long before we are trying to perform that skill. In fact we will likely become so impatient to practice the skill we are studying that we might take action prematurely.

In the case of personal growth self-help materials, however, the opposite can be true.   Personal growth and personal development literature, articles, podcasts, videos, blogs and websites can turn into “comfort food” for our minds and emotions. They can become escape-content rather than a springboard to the actions we need to take – the actions essential to our growth programs.

We may read endlessly about how to break our bad habits, or how to stop procrastinating, or how to set lifetime goals, rather than taking action to start implementing the ideas we are studying.

The reading and the studying should be the preparation for the work of personal growth; they should not be the end in itself.   The renowned historian Arnold Toynbee, in his book, Experiences, gave this advice: “Act promptly as soon as you feel that your mind is ripe for taking action. To wait too long may be even more untoward in its effects than to plunge in too precipitously.”

Toynbee related how he did not accomplish what he wanted to in his historical writing until he changed his habit of reading and studying as a student or examinee, and began a habit of taking notes while reading, as a writer, with a view to recording materials that he believed would be useful  for his history writing.