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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.

The role of managing the ego in enabling the Law of Attraction and influencing positive personal development March 14, 2012

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Ego Management.
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In recent years there has been a lot discussion about the dynamics of our minds and our thought processes, or ego management, and the concept that improper channelling of our thoughts can lead to negative results regarding workings of the Law of Attraction.

If we simplify the concepts of managing our ego, controlling our ego, or regarding our ego as a management challenge; and also simplify the concept of the Law of Attracting to stating that positive thoughts attract positive results and negative thoughts produce negative results, it is clear that our ego or simply the workings of our mind can have a definite influence on some outcomes in our lives.

Although the concept of our thoughts or our egos influencing life outcomes is as old as the written word, and is a key component of wisdom writing from ancient times to the present, it is only recently that the idea has been codified with the words the “Law of Attraction.”

There is some thinking that, by taking advantage of the Law of Attraction, if we can only think abundance and not scarcity, for example, then we can attract abundance in our lives. It all seems simple, mystical and magical.

However, many critics of the popular concept of the Law of Attraction note that all the ego management we can muster, and all the positive thoughts we can produce are not enough to solve many of the serious problems we face in our lives, and which the people of the world face in their day-to-day struggles to survive and prosper.

I am not saying that ego management, ego control , mind control, or thought control applied or implemented towards the Law of Attraction does not work, but I do believe that it works differently than the simple and popularized conception of: abundance  thinking = attraction of abundance; or scarcity thinking = attraction of scarcity.

I believe that The Law of Attraction does exist, but in a more complex way than has been popularized, and I also think there should be recognition that there is also a Law of Repelling, or, stated in more familiar terms,  a Law of Non-Attraction.  It is our conscious decisions in managing our mind, our thinking, or our ego that energizes these laws, or principles; coupled with positive actions.

My own experience with the Law of Attraction and my so-called Law of Non-Attraction or “Law of Repelling“ is that if we take positive actions, such as working on specific goals in a program of personal development and start to have success with various components in our personal growth program, we are likely to have a more positive personality. By achieving successes through managing our ego to focus on setting goals and achieving them, we start to recognize additional opportunities for growth and can capitalize on them.

The Law of Attraction might say that we are “attracting” these opportunities, but what is really happening is that we are allowing these opportunities to present themselves to an open, accepting mind, and to an ego that is confident and not fearful of change.

Similarly, if we allow our ego to run rampant with negativity, do not attempt to accomplish any personal growth gaols and thereby create a positive mental attitude, we will not likely  be in a position to recognize opportunities as they manifest, and in effect could say that the Law of Non-Attraction is operating.

As another example, if we are facing significant financial problems and start to manage our ego or mind to begin looking at possible solutions and setting realistic goals to make or save extra money, instead of worrying about our money difficulties, then we are more likely to recognize opportunities in the financial sphere when they present themselves.  Proponents of the everyday interpretation of the Law of Attraction might say we are attracting“ those opportunities.

Conversely, if we focus our ego or mind on scarcity and continuously worry about the bad financial circumstances we are in, we are not likely to be in a position to seize chances to improve our finances when favourable circumstances arise. The negative focus of our ego or mindset is then blinding us to opportunity. Proponents of the usual interpretation of the Law of attraction would say that this is a demonstration of scarcity thinking = scarcity attraction.