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Setting vague goals can be counter-productive for personal development March 17, 2012

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Goal Setting and Realization.
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Setting goals and realizing them is a key component of any program of personal development or personal growth. Without specific tangible goals our self-improvement efforts may be no more than an unfocused positive thinking exercise.

Before we explore the concept of setting goals, however, we need to ask ourselves why we need to set goals in the first place. Why don’t we just get things done and move on to a new task or project? Why for example would we need to set a goal to realize the accomplishment of a particular circumstance that needs to be dealt with? For that matter, why do we need to have a personal development or growth program?

The answer I think lies in the complexity our lives have assumed in recent years. We have the same needs for success in various areas that people have always had: earning a living, contributing to the community, raising our children, looking after our family, assisting our parents if they are elderly, paying taxes, and on, and on, and on. It has been like this for hundreds of years in human history.

But what has changed in recent years is that in each of these areas of responsibility, the requirements for success are much more detailed than in the past. Each component of our life responsibilities has many more areas of concern in which we must be successful compared with even ten years ago. The result is that in effect we now have to look on our lives as a management project in which concepts such as scheduling, setting priorities, and time management are critical. Therefore we feel compelled to set goals that we need to accomplish.

Let’s look at the growing complexity of the component of our life that we call “our work”, for example, which has become very complicated compared with only a few years ago. Meetings, deadlines, interpersonal relationships, productivity targets, key result areas, performance improvement, and employee evaluations; each involving, of course, many separate tasks and timetables.

Faced with all this detail that needs to be dealt with, we turn to the concept of personal development and personal growth programs and then discover that setting goals is going to be an important part of that process. But some of the required goals we need to set seem very difficult to execute or deal with on a daily basis. How then do we go about successfully meeting these growth challenges we establish for ourselves? The answer lies in the old question: “How do you eat an elephant?” Answer: “One bite at a time.” That may seem simplistic, but let’s examine the idea.

In establishing our goals in our personal development program we need to ensure that they are specific and embody measurable objectives. While the overall objective of a personal growth program may be to improve our effectiveness and confidence in dealing with the situations and challenges that life presents to us, such an overall goal is not easily measurable, other than subjectively.

The danger in not being able to concretely measure a goal we have set for ourselves is that we will not be able to see specific progress on a goal and might become discouraged because of the apparent lack of moving forward in our program.

Measuring a major goal that has been set means more than simply either achieving the goal or not achieving it. If an overall goal is too broad or large to be realized all at once, or quickly, it is better to break down such major gaols down into smaller sub-goals, ideally with timeframes or deadlines for completing each of the sub-goals that we have set for ourselves to complete.

A major goal we may have set could be overcoming a habit of procrastination. Again this is a difficult goal to quantify unless we reach a certain point in our lives when we no longer procrastinate anything and can say we have definitively cured ourselves of that habit.

The sub-goals we could set for overcoming procrastination could be to simply list the things we have been procrastinating, and then tackle them one by one, breaking down if necessary the items on our list into even smaller goals or tasks.  We can then feel we are accomplishing something in the overall goal we have set of dealing with things we have been putting off.

Managing the ego can produce significant personal development benefits March 14, 2012

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Ego Management.
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If we can accept the broad definition of Eckhart Tolle that the ego is essentially the constantly chattering voice in our head, or our incessant thinking about the past and present, it is clear that controlling the ego needs to be part of a successful program of personal growth, a program, which by definition, must focus on the actions we take in the present.

The ego, which is sometimes wrongly identified only with excessive pride or egotism, can in fact be a voice that discourages us, a voice that makes us fearful and concerned with all the worrisome “what if” scenarios that could unfold in our future. Similarly the ego can hang us up in the past with the many “could have” or “should have” situations we revisit from our past life.

The ego, or the constantly thinking voice in our head, often prevents us from enjoying the present moment. The only way we can seem to avoid this non-stop voice of the ego is to become totally absorbed in something. This is one of the reasons why we all enjoy hobbies or favourite pursuits; we are looking for relief from the voice in our heads that will not leave us in peace. This is when we are “in the zone” and are too preoccupied to allow the ego to interfere. In effect, this is when the  ego is shut out.

In his seminal book, A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle presents his idea of what life would be like if we could exercise control over the ego, or effectively manage the ego: “As the ego is no longer running your life, the psychological need for external security, which is illusory anyway, lessens. When you become comfortable with uncertainty, infinite possibilities open up in your life. It means fear is no longer a dominant factor in what you do and no longer prevents you from taking action to initiate change. ..If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear. If it [uncertainty] is acceptable, it turns into increased aliveness, alertness and creativity.”

In many ways the concept of personal development or personal growth does indeed focus on the future, but it does so in a positive way rather than repeatedly walking a never-ending path of a future filled with the obstacles of negativity and fear. There is no harm in our thinking about the future in a positive way and making plans for personal improvement, because by doing so we are removing the element of apprehension from our egos.

Taking concrete steps to plan for the future is vastly different than worrying or fretting about the future, but not taking tangible steps to realize our goals. However, as most of us have discovered, calming the ego, controlling the ego, or managing the ego, is not an easy task. That is why the word development is used in the term “personal development.” Development is a constant and continuing process, and even though the goals are in the future, the action towards a positive future is being taken in steady steps now,  in the present moment.

There have been many books, videos, and other information sources developed with the goal of helping us to live in the present moment and enjoy the “now.” Many of these suggestions focus on meditation and other spiritual practices. These approaches can be important as components of our overall personal growth programs and our strategies for self-improvement.

But taking action on realizing our gaols is also vital. Focussing on a goal in the present, or planning in the present for achieving our future goals keeps us focussed on the positive aspects of the  present moment.  And that is one of the best ways to control the ego, or at least to minimize the ego’s tendency to fill the present moment with regrets about the past or foreboding about the future.