Making changes: In situations, in ourselves, and our in our perceptions October 30, 2018
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal growth.Tags: achieving goals, changing our persceptions, changing ourselves, inspiration, life, philosophy, psychology, self-actualization, self-awareness, Stephen Covey, writing
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“If we want to change a situation, we first have to change ourselves; and to change ourselves effectively, we first have to change our perceptions.”
This quotation from Stephen Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People shows why we find dealing with change so difficult.
The words personal growth or development imply change; without change, growth and development cannot happen.
The reality of a situation and our ability to act on that situation, to change it, will involve the deep internal work of changing how we see things.
And changing how wee see things is one of the toughest jobs we will face in our journey towards self-actualization.
Dennis Mellersh
Personal development: Leveraging the power of repetition October 15, 2018
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development.Tags: achieving goals, inspiration, life, personal growth jargon, personal growth program, philosophy, psychology, Steven Pressfield, the power of repetition, the resistance, writing
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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
Personal Development Ideas 