Unleash Your Potential #38 - Personal Growth

Douglas: Welcome to the Unleash Your Potential Blog, what question can I answer for you today?

AchievementAid: What strategies can help me achieve personal growth? 

Douglas: Thank you so much for asking! Personal growth is important for all of us. If we are not growing we can become complacent or stagnant. I am glad you are asking this question because it means that, on some level, you are interested in being better than you are right now. BRAVO!

The question then becomes how to move toward that growth. Fortunately, there are lots of opinions and strategies out there and like all things, I suspect that the right answer lies somewhere in the middle. What I offer is what I have found to work and what I have encountered in my reading on the topic. I suggest that you try these out and monitor the result. If they work, GREAT…if not, try something else. It's all about finding the things that fit for you.

• Set goals – While you can grow by accident, generally speaking having clear, specific goals (see SMARTR goals blog). Goals allow us to put plans in place that make it much easier to grow. When we set goals we can then determine what steps have to take and where the places are that we have growth opportunities. Goals help us understand what resources we need to help us get there.

• Lifelong Learner – Achieving personal growth walks hand in hand with lifelong learning. To be able to grow, you must move beyond your existing knowledge. While you do not need to go back to school and get more degrees (like I enjoy doing), you do need to be willing to be a student of things you don’t know. This can be through watching instructional videos, reading, hands-on learning, or a variety of other options. The point is that to grow you must be willing to keep learning!

• Positive Attitude/Lose the Limiting Beliefs – How you approach life has a significant impact on how much you can grow. If you believe that you cannot grow, then I promise you that you will create that reality. In contrast, if you believe that you can grow and change, then you will create conditions and seek out situations where you will grow. A positive attitude can make a huge difference!

• Healthy Relationships – If you put a flower among weeds, eventually the weeds will choke out the flower, and the flower will wither and die, or at the very least its growth will be very stunted. The people we keep in our garden influence how much we grow. Hang around with negative people who aren’t growing and pretty soon you will stop growing. Spend time with positive people who are moving forward and you will be inspired to do the same.

• Get moving – I am a well-trained procrastinator. I offer this tip as one who fights this battle every day. If you are going to achieve personal growth you have to START TODAY! The only way you move forward is by taking the first step. Procrastination and laziness start small and seem harmless enough, but each day they get stronger and stronger until they become nearly impossible to overcome. The good news is you can overcome procrastination and laziness by just taking one step. Make some sort of movement toward growth, celebrate that step, and then take another. Each step makes you a little more confident and makes the next step just a little bit easier.

Personal growth is the most important thing we can do. Personal growth can be overcoming self-doubt (which I have written about), or curbing negative self-talk (which I have also written about). Personal growth is the whole reason you might speak to a coach. Their whole purpose is to help you identify your goals and move towards them, which leads to more personal growth.

I hope my answer sheds some light on your question. If you want to dig into this concept further, I encourage you to reach out and set up a conversation. In the meantime, check back tomorrow for the next question in the Unleash Your Potential Series!

Be Well!

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