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Personal growth Rule # 1: Look after your health July 30, 2018

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Goal Setting and Realization.
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In our efforts to utilize personal development programs to improve ourselves intellectually, morally, emotionally, and spiritually, we can lose sight of the need to take care of our physical health; this can lead to ignorance about our health that could be catastrophic.

Many of us may find it worrisome to get an annual physical with our doctor, but a yearly check-up might uncover a treatable condition, which, left untreated, could become a very serious health problem.

We each probably make an effort to do all the “right” things about our health; proper diet, cutting down or quitting smoking, watching alcohol intake, getting exercise.

But not getting an annual medical check-up could interfere with the positives of such health efforts.

Many medical conditions, particularly in their early stages, can be virtually free of perceptible symptoms, such as high blood pressure and higher than normal blood sugar, but nevertheless need to be treated medically.

Actions steps are a key component of successful self-improvement and self-actualization.

A good action step to take right now is to make an appointment for a physical check-up.

And overall, on an ongoing basis, to make our physical health an integral part of our personal growth goals.

Personal growth literature and the timeless quality of human nature July 1, 2018

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal growth.
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Sometimes when, through a period of time, we have delved into a lot of personal development and self-actualization materials, including very old commentary, it may seem that there is really nothing new in much of it.

And the reason is likely that individuals, the people such material is written about and directed to, do not change, even over countless centuries.

As Erich Hoffer writes:

“It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations, past and present, are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual’s hungers, anxieties, dreams and preoccupations have remained unchanged through millennia…

“…If in some manner the voice of an individual reaches us from the remotest distance of time, it is a timeless voice speaking about ourselves.”

It is the individual, rather than any particular society as a whole that is “nearest to our understanding; so near that even the interval of millennia cannot weaken our feeling of kinship,” Hoffer observes. (1)

Historical examples are numerous: ancient philosophical texts, such as the writings of Roman and Greek philosophers, playwrights, and poets; centuries old religious tracts; wall paintings in the tombs of ancient Egypt.

(1) Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition, Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1973

Dennis Mellersh