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Personal growth: Is everyone reading self-help books these days? April 13, 2018

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in personal development ideas.
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I was recently reading a newspaper interview of a novelist, and one of the questions was, “What is the latest self-help book you have read?”, which struck me as significant because it implies or assumes that everyone is reading self-help books as part of their regular routine.

And maybe it’s true: I just got a personal development book, The Happiness Equation, out of the library a few days before I read the article.

The question we might ask, however, is that with all the self-improvement material we have already read, how much more advice do we really need to manage our lives effectively?

I suspect that most of us actually don’t need more information in order to know what we need to do; it’s more a matter of inserting an action component into our existing knowledge, and then taking concrete “do” steps towards our goals.

I tend to think that many of us read books about self-actualization, listen to podcasts on the topic, and watch videos with similar content, because we enjoy reading about the topic as a form of lifestyle philosophy, much as we might like reading mystery novels, or adventure stories.

Maybe we don’t actually need as much life-guidance as the abundance of personal development books might seem to indicate.

Maybe we’re all OK just as we are.

Dennis Mellersh

Personal growth: Imitating Thoreau’s self-sufficiency ideas April 8, 2018

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in personal development ideas.
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It could be an interesting intellectual and emotional experiment in the realm of self-actualization ideas to see if we could imitate, in our mentally-oriented personal growth programs, the physically focussed two-year experiment of Henry David Thoreau who in 1845, built his own home in the woods near Walden Pond, living alone, close to nature, a mile from his nearest neighbour.

His goal was to live with the greatest self-sufficiency and simplicity as possible, depending as much as was practicable on no-one but himself.

What it would be like to duplicate this process in our minds by giving up all contact with the self-actualization information world for a period of, say, two months?

No mental uploading of any personal development media whatsoever…

… a vacation from the constantly increasing flow of self-help information and opinions competing for our attention.

A chance to live by our own mental, spiritual, and emotional resources.

But, feeling the need to always keep up to date with the self-help universe can sometimes seem like an addiction, the pull is so strong.

Perhaps we’d need to try this by starting with one week’s abstinence…or one day.

Dennis Mellersh