Personal growth: A willingness to believe and to learn May 28, 2014
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development, Personal Development Potential.Tags: bias to action, continuous improvement process, education process, Eric Hoffer, personal development potential, personal growth optimism, philosophy, positive thinking, self-betterment
add a comment
Two significant personality characteristics of people engaged in a program of personal development and growth are:
(1) A willingness to believe that change for the better is possible
(2) A willingness to take the action steps (the work) to implement change
These two emotional and intellectual characteristics are also common to individuals throughout history who have struggled in difficult socio-economic environments and produced significant accomplishments to improve society as a whole.
So, as someone seriously exploring the concept of self-improvement, you are among a select group of believers and doers; you already have a strong sense of identity and a strong bias to action.
Essentially, you are an optimist with a mindset favourable to enabling your self-actualization.
Some critics of the personal development movement contend that personal growth practitioners keep buying self-improvement materials year after year, in a never ending process of seeking new information. The argument being; if personal growth concepts actually work, then why do people need to keep obtaining new information about the process?
This criticism fails to recognize the essential truth that self-betterment is a lifelong and life-oriented learning process, not a short-term problem/solution equation.
The real goal in personal growth is the well-being and growth-attitude generated by the continuous improvement process itself.
You are participating in an educational effort that will pay intellectual and emotional dividends both now and perhaps even more so in the future. And you may end up being much better prepared to deal with the future as it unfolds compared to people not engaged in personal growth.
Here is how the philosopher Eric Hoffer looks at the process of education:
“The central task of education is to implant a will and a facility for learning; it should produce not learned, but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society. Where grandparents, parents, and children are students together…In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.” (1)
(1) Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition
Personal growth: Our past does not equal our future May 20, 2014
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal growth, Living in the Now.Tags: achieving goals, negative thinking, personal development, personal development potential, personal growth, phiosophy, positive thinking, self-improvement, Tony Robbins
add a comment
One of the impediments to effectively implementing our personal growth and development programs can be the way we look at our past, and the attributes we apply to our past behaviour.
The past can be a barrier to forward progress in self-improvement if we look at it through a pessimistic and fatalistic perspective.
We might view the past and its problems as a negative indicator of how things will be in the future.
We might look at our past and fill our minds with regret of what we did or didn’t do.
We might negatively assess our entire personality based on our past.
One conclusion is inescapable; our past behaviour does affect our present and future circumstances.
However, can can’t un-do the past. We can only work in the present to build a positive outcome for the future.
In his book, Notes From a Friend, Tony Robbins makes a significant and carefully worded statement about the past and the future:
“Remember that what you did in the past does not determine what you’ll do in the future.”
In other words, we may not be able to change what we did in the past or its influence on our lives today, but we can change how we will act, what we will do, in the future.
In his comment Robbins is emphasising that behavioural change is possible, that our actions now can positively affect our future; that our past behaviour pattern does not have to be our future behaviour pattern.
We can’t un-ring a bell, but we can ring a new bell.
Positive thinking versus negative thinking.
Personal Development Ideas 