Personal Development

Get Organized. Stay Motivated. Enjoy Life.

Archives for July 2006

Recover From Personal Development Failure

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As strange as it sounds, many people feel like they’ve failed in their personal development. They feel the need to recover from it in order to successfully move on. Since I personally don’t believe you can fail with your personal development, I thought an article explaining my point of view on such matters might actually help.

Personal development is a process, not an event

Before I talk about anything else, let me make a statement: personal development is a life-long process, not an event. Thus, you can’t miss it and never get another chance to experience it – a chance to improve something about yourself is always around.

Once started with personal development, you will feel the urge and need to develop yourself mentally, emotionally and spiritually on a constant basis.

After you see the first results of self-improvement, you will not be able to drop it – you will get hooked up and will use every opportunity to improve something else about yourself.

There is no such thing as failure

I like this quote by Anthony Robbins a lot. In full, it goes like this:

“There is no such thing as failure. There are only results.“

Even more so with personal development: you can’t, and you won’t fail, if you have the right attitude.

If you already read books or listen to audio materials on personal development, chances are that you’ve isolated a few areas of yourself which need improvement. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you, but it clearly shows your dedication to pushing the bar even higher for yourself.

Well, here’s some good news for you: becoming aware of your weaknesses or areas to be improved, is a huge advantage on its own. To you this means, that even if you had only agreed that some things about yourself could be improved, but had no chance or no courage to actually do something about them, you already have made positive progress!

Remember it: you cannot fail with your personal development!

There is no harm in trying

As with anything else, it is very important that you actually try doing something in order to improve yourself. What I’m saying is this: if you are not sure whether some actions on your personal development plan will work or not, do them anyway! Anything you do, no matter how insignificant it might seem, will make a positive difference in the end. You may not see any immediate results, but you will improve eventually.

Sometimes, you have to try something only to get experience. This gained experience will help you make better decisions and take proper actions trying some other parts of your personal development.

Don’t know about you, but to me it’s always better to try my best at something and not get the perfect result from the first attempt, than to never even try it.

Having not reached the goal, I will learn as much as I can from the mistakes made, and will definitely approach the same problem at a later time, just to test it again and see if I can cope with it using new experience. I never give up easily, just because I believe that you can achieve anything if you try your best. And it simply takes way too many attempts for me to be absolutely sure that I’ve tried everything I could to achieve my goal.

One very good thing such an approach gives me is certainty: I’m much more sure about my ability to get through many problems I face, simply because I know I’ll keep trying no matter what.

From the other hand, deciding to not even try something has very negative impact. It will not only discourage you from many other things, seemingly independent from what you’re giving up on, but it will also haunt you for many days (weeks and sometimes even years) to come. As time will pass, you will feel more and more confident about facing the original challenge, and you will also start getting really irritated with yourself for not trying your best back when you had the opportunity. You’ll be lucky if it’s not too late to do it, but quite often the chance is gone.

You should know: with personal development it’s never too late to start, but I advise you make the decision to improve yourself once and forever, and then fearlessly try anything that might help you improve.

Find ways to motivate yourself

Personal development is a constant process. It is very easy to get started, but it is impossible to finish. You’ll be constantly improving yourself throughout your life, so you might as well learn how to get and stay motivated about your self-growth.

Think about it this way: millions of people go through their lives without any questioning. They spend year after year, not even hoping to improve anything. Some people are genuinely happy, of course, but the majority is simply too weak and too lazy – and so, due to one reason or another, most of them never find the courage, time or motivation to get started with their personal development.

Compared to them, you’ve already made a giant leap forward: you’ve made a decision to improve. You’ve made a commitment, and you have taken the first few steps. Why stop now, that you’ve gone this far?

One very simple way of staying motivated about your personal development is to make a small improvement every day. You don’t have to make a big change or transform completely, but as long as you consciously improve something really small about yourself on a regular basis, you’re on the right track and you’ve got all the reasons to feel good about it.

Personal development opens limitless opportunities to you, because it’s a process of bringing your enjoyment of life and your self-growth to such highs which in the past were never thought possible. You not only can, but you most definitely will outgrow yourself: that’s the whole idea of personal development. Isn’t it motivating enough, to spend every day of your life changing and growing better?

Goal setting: do you know your goals?

Quite often, the disappointment comes from wrongly chosen goals. Failing in something most often means not failing to make progress, but failing to get the result you wished for. So it is very important to be able to understand where your frustration comes from in order to react.

Because your personal development is a process and not an event, you have to be conscious about a few things.

For instance, You’re not going to reach a point in your life when you’ll be 100% finished with your personal development. Just accept it, and never make it your goal. Otherwise, you’ll end up doing the right things, growing personally more and more, and still not being able to enjoy the results, because you’ll be waiting for some final state of mind which you simply can’t reach.

This is probably one of the cases when it is very appropriate to suggest: enjoy the process! Personal development is about constant self-growth and improvement, and as you grow, you’ll be setting higher and higher goals in your development, and therefore achieving more and more.

Well, hopefully you now get the picture and understand that there is really no way you could possibly fail with your personal development. Some results might take longer to show, but you will get there eventually.

Learn to enjoy your self-improvement, and always remember: one of the signs of being successful in personal development is genuinely enjoying the process of it!

Get Email Updates from this Personal Development Blog

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For those of you who are more comfortable with reading emails than subscribing to RSS feeds, I’ve just created a way for you to subscribe to my regular email updates.

You should find the subscribe form on the side panel of every page of my blog, and it will only take few seconds for you to activate your subscription. The registration form is also found on my Email Updates page, if you prefer.

As of right now, email updates will be just exactly what it says – regular updates delivering the latest articles on personal development straight to your inbox. If I see a lot of interest in email service, I may also create a weekly or monthly feature which will have additional information never posted on this blog.

Let me know what you think, I’m open to any suggestions, as always!

Take Control of Your Habits

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I recently came back to a wonderful habit of attending our gym during a lunch break at work. Due to personal reasons, I couldn’t use it for about 2 months, and it feels great to be back. What’s even better is that I had no struggle with getting back into the routine – everything happened in a very smooth and natural way.

There are few reasons making this comeback a success, and I just wanted to write them down for you, as they are universal and can be applied to almost any habit you’re trying to work out or get rid of.

Pain and pleasure

According to Tony Robbins, anything we do is motivated by pain and pleasure. No matter what we’re trying to do in our lives, we’re doing this to either avoid pain or to gain pleasure.

As simple and obvious as it sounds to me now, it was quite a revelation when I read his theory on this just a few months ago. And it still surprises me to see how universal this rule of pain and pleasure really is. It applies to everything we do or plan to do, and it’s possible to explain any action of ours by simply pointing to the pain or pleasure which motivated us to act.

What also was noticed by Tony is that we’re somehow much more motivated by pain than by pleasure. In other words, we’ll be willing to do much more in order to escape some pain than we’ll do to gain some pleasure.

So, one of the reasons my gym comeback is so easy, is simply because I got used to a habit of working out so much (I’ve been doing it for pretty much the past 6 month before I had to abandon the habit), that it gives me a great pleasure to work out. And it’s also almost physically painful not to work out, because my muscles are not getting the usual strain and I’m not feeling as fit as I’m used to unless I regularly work out.

My pain and pleasure motivations are clear to me. Here they are:

Pain of not going to gym:

  • gaining excessive weight
  • losing my usually high energy levels
  • not giving my body the much needed work out

Pleasure of attending gym:

  • staying fit and gradually getting into my best shape
  • growing strenght and improving my stamina
  • enjoying the high energy levels- being more productive during the day

These are just a few, the actual list of my pain and pleasure motivations for attending gym is much longer.

Establish associations properly

With habits, it is especially important to stay conscious of your painful and pleasurable aspects associated with them. The key to successfully mastering a particular habit is to place the right pain and pleasure motivation associations around it.

To fully control your habit, it is absolutely crucial to have both pain and pleasure associations related to it, this way you’re doubling the chance of success by gaining the advantage of being motivated by both pain and pleasure.

Take a few minutes of your time and write down all the good reasons for gaining a particular habit, making note of every little association you can come up with. Go wild! Extrapolate the results you’re going to get by following through with the habit, and imagine what you’re going to feel like 5 or 10 years later if your habit is successfully mastered. Make sure you don’t rush your thoughts and very carefully select every motivating reason.

Now, take even more time to write down all the negative impact you’ll see by not following through with this habit. Note the first and most important few things which come up when you’re thinking of the habit, and then gradually work your way down to the tiniest painful details of how not having a habit in your life might turn out. Again, thinking far in the future will greatly help.

It was very easy for me to start my gym sessions this time around, because I have all the proper associations already in place. Here are just a few of them:

Working out:

  • equals immediate pleasure, health improvement, higher energy levels and better productivity in other activities
  • give me a joy of knowing I’m in a full control over my body weight
  • means getting closer to my ideal shape every day

NOT working out:

  • equals slow degradation of my health, lower energy levels
  • equals pain of not being able to control my weight
  • adds up to a list of habits I’m quite capable of mastering but still haven’t

Know exactly what you want

Working a new habit out, be sure you have some realistic goals and you know exactly what your outcomes shoud be. It is also equally important to know what outcomes you don’t want to get from following through with the habit.

It will only help if you have a list of goals related to each habit you’re working on, so that you can constantly and regularly review them and see whether you’re moving off course or still following the original plan of yours.

With working out, it’s dead simple to establish just the goals you need. Read some appropriate literature, talk to your instructor and write down a thorough plan for your training. Everything is quite measurable, so you’ll have no problem getting your expectations in a form of how many minutes you should spend warming up or doing cardio, how many sets and reps of a particular exercise you’ll do, etc. And once there is a through plan, it will be easier for you to stick to it by just reviewing it as often as you feel necessary to ensure you’re making progress.

Mastering habits isn’t easy, but knowing simple principles I’ve explained above is bound to simplify the process for you. Pain and pleasure can be very motivating, and so it is only natural that you improve your chances of success by employing the appopriate accociations.

Never Let Your Ideas Go

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Have you ever had a brilliant idea? The one which seemed wonderful at a time, yet you weren’t motivated enough to make a note of it, or you genuinely had not a chance to jot it down? The regret of not acting immediately on such an idea is capable of causing a major nervous breakdown – simply because you will blame yourself for letting such an opportunity go.

I know I’ve had quite a few of such ideas lost forever, before I had finally decided to never let any of them go. After all, if there is only one brilliant idea I get in many years, I simply can’t afford losing the chance to be proud and successful it gives me!

What are the main reasons you let ideas go away?

For me, these reasons were the following:

  • Not being able to write an idea down
    Your circumstances could be different, but for me this was the most limiting factor.Very often, I would list to some music while driving to and from work. Certain compositions might trigger a sudden sparkle of ideas in my mind, and I would usually feel really excited about it. Still, by the time I would arrive at the destination, walk up to my desk and get a moment to type, I would forget the idea and only the residual joy of having a bright idea would stay with me for a few minutes more.

    This is when I get both upset and irritated. Especially if I don’t remember anything about my idea at all. Somehow it would make it feel as if I let the greatest chance of my life go away. The thing is, if I can remember at least some part of the idea, it may be a relieve to realise it wasn’t such a great idea anyway. But when I don’t remember anything, it is very upsetting.

    I’ve narrowed this problem down to not being able to write my ideas down when I was driving my car. By the time I would enter my office, the idea would be lost. Quick change of the environment around you is bound to distract you from whatever it is you were thinking.

    So in situations like this, even a simple trick can make dramatic difference.

    For me it was getting the cheapest kind of a paper notepad with pencil, and putting them into the plastic door pocket in my car. Now, whenever I get a really good idea, I can always write it down if I’m parked, or if I’m not, I know that I won’t have to leave my car and risk forgetting the idea.

    I also make an effort to concentrate on the idea even more. Turn off the music, and start developing the idea – adding more possible features to it and looking for possible ways to make the idea even a greater one will help you remember it better. When I finally arrive, I don’t leave my car until the idea is written down. And if it needs be, I can always tear one of the notepad pages to take the important note with me and then put the task into my electronic ideas repository.

  • Not seeing the value of the idea
    This is another very common reason for discarding some really great ideas. Remember: if you have identified a particular flow of thinking as a separate idea, you need to make a note of it.Some ideas are never meant to be easy-to-understand. They’re just not as obvious as some other ideas of yours. This doesn’t mean they’re wrong or useless. All it really means is that you have to save such ideas and review them in a few days (weeks) time. By that time, you’ll likely to have thought up and written down many more ideas, and who knows what meaning and value the original idea would have then!
  • Letting an idea go because you think it is stupid
    However small or worthless it may seem, you have to write your idea down and give it a proper thought at a later time.I’ve found it most useful to write down anything which comes up when I’m thinking on a particular subject, and later (usually in the evening) I spend 10-15 minutes just to scan through all the notes and use the most appealing ideas.
  • Not being able to identify the use for an idea
    Your idea doesn’t have to be immediately useful or applicable piece of knowledge!Just write it down now, and analyze it later. You’ll thank yourself many times for doing so.

    It is very common that the best ideas come unexpected, and seem irrelevant to the topic you’re trying to think of. That’s okay! Take the note, and you can classify the idea later!

Write your every idea down

Get into the habit of writing your ideas down. Make it one of your first steps towards a really successful life. Never let your ideas go, because:

  • this way, you will never feel like you’ve lost the greatest opportunityThere is nothing worse than feeling regret for the rest of your life simply because you haven’t written some idea down. It could be a silly one, too – but it’s the fact that you don’t know this for sure that will make feel like you’ve lost something
  • making notes of every idea will greatly improve your chances for success

    Not all the ideas have to be successful. Think about it: all it will take to make you successful is just one great idea.Many inventors came up with hundreds of absolutely useless ideas. They invented stuff which made no sense even to themselves, let alone others. Yet, they meticulously documented every experiment of theirs, every tiny detail and though they had. They kept trying, until one day all the pieces came together, and great discoveries and inventions were made.
  • you will become more organized
    Making notes of every idea will get you into a habit of reviewing all the ideas quickly and spotting good ideas right away. This will allow you to immediately pay more attention to them, without having to come back later with a proper analysis.

For all the ideas you come up with, there’s a rule of thumb: save them. Write them down, and even if you never feel like analyzing these idea, that’s okay. Someday you’ll read one of them accidentally while looking for some other useful information, and you’ll be shocked at how much sense it will make to you.

Learn the habit of writing every idea down. It could be a short phrase or even a word, but if it inspired or interested you for even a second, write it down immediately. This way, you will never let an idea go, and who knows, maybe one of your ideas will be the greatest discovery of tomorrow?

Introducing a friendly blog: Radical Hop

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I think I’ve mentioned RadicalHop before, but today I’ve decided to start another good tradition on Personal Development Ideas – introducing the friendly blogs I read.

RadicalHop is a relatively new (just like mine) personal development and self-growth blog by Peter Kua. Peter lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and is a very passionate writer with broad interests and an open mind.

He reads a lot and writes easy-to-follow articles on achieving goals, building a successful career, finding the right balance between physical and spiritual aspects of your life, and generally enjoying your life.

I’m a regular subscriber of his blog, and we quite often email each other just to follow some interesting topics up.

If you’re looking to read something interesting on personal development, please have a look at some of his articles I liked:

Plan Your Time For Writing New Articles

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I’ve been trying to find the best way to keep up with the task of a regular new articles writing for my blogs. Unfortunately, it’s not the easiest task imaginable. I mean, it’s been a good few years of me blogging, and I still haven’t found the right approach. But I never surrender so easily, and so with my Personal Development Ideas blog I’ve inspired myself so much that recently I’ve decided to continue my research.

And what I find very useful now to ensure new articles get written and posted regularly is this: I simply plan for the time I’m going to spend working on the articles. Only the best of us can just sit down for half-an-hour a day and provide brilliantly witty content which then gets popular among the people. But for others, and I’m one of them, writing a new article isn’t as easy. There has to be some research carried out, some books read and some blogs (re)visited.

I usually write a few paragraphs of text on a given topic and then sit back to simply think them over just once more. It’s very unusual for me to go back through my text and spend extra time reading it all again, fixing typos and changing sentences. I’m usually more like “do it once – forget till the next time”. So if I’m writing an article, I’m so thrilled with the ideas I’m talking about and sharing with readers, that I simply know that there is no way and no point for me to re-read my paragraphs – I will not be willing to change a single sentence.

Yes, there is a price to pay for this. Sometimes I have to spend an extra minute or two on a particular sentence, simply because somewhere deep inside of me I feel that the sentence isn’t going to serve the purpose I have for it. And so I keep trying various forms and words, until the sentence looks exactly like it should. But if I accepted it and moved on, I’m very unlikely to come back to it and edit it.

I don’t suppose this approach is the best one, but it had worked for me so far, and so I’m happy.

When you agree with yourself on a particular time in your day which you’re going to spend on writing your articles, you’re effectively making all your plans much more real. As with many things, agreeing on something means some kind of commitment. And once you’re committed to something, you’re much more likely to follow through simply because now you know: not only were you going to work on articles, but you have just made a promise to do so, you’ve committed yourself.

Another positive side of having a certain time designated to writing for your blog is that if you book this time for your own use, and finally agree with everyone else not to interfere, you’ll end up having this time all to yourself.

Even if you think you ran out of ideas, you still have time left to continue your work. You’ve committed to working on articles, and so if you’re not writing – start planning new ones. Work on the titles, think of new post series, or simply read some of your old articles one again!

I think I’ve learned it from Steve Pavlina’s pages, that you’re going to be much more productive if you allocate substantial amounts of time to every particular task and tackle tasks one by one. While in many cases you can multitask, I believe you really should do concentrate and refrain from doing anything else when writing.

In his Do It Now article, Steve explains why it is very important for you not to get distracted during your working on something hours. Once your focus is lost, it will take you at least 15 minutes to regain it. Because of this, it’s better to have 45-60 minutes allocated to any task- if you don’t get distracted, you’re going to have enough time to write a sketch for a serious article or even complete a simple post. And if you have been distracted, you’re still going to have enough time to regain your focus and finish the work.