The role of Personal Development and Self Improvement is to help you achieve your goals in life. Both are designed to give you the skills you need to achieve whatever it is that you want to achieve. But can personal development or self improvement really improve your life situations?
Well, the purpose of both self improvement and personal development is to do just that. They are both just tools that are used to ensure you will succeed in your chosen life areas. They are desgined to help you become happier on the inside and more satisfied with what you have on the outside in any are you chose to apply them!
You may not now know how to proceed. So what type of personal development goals should you set? How do you start to develop self improvement goals that will lead you to freedom, a deeper feeling of happiness, help you achieve a better lifestyle and ultimately create more success in your life? This question is not simple to answer because success means different things to different people. Therefore, if you want to become successful you must first have a clear understanding of what success means to you!
A fantastic way to get a clear on what success means for you is to ask yourself the question, “what would I do if I knew I couldn’t fail?” Allow yourself to bask in the mental image that is produced. The vision that is created in your mind will show you what you really want in life and from this vision you can see what success means to you.
From the moment a person is born he/she has a natural ability to know what it is they want and a belief that they can have it. We develop dreams and ambitions at a very early age. However as we grow older we are conditioned to believe that these dreams are not possible or are mere fantasies of our imagination. You are directed to get a good education so that you can find a good job that will allow you to get a mortgage, get married, have kids and live a ‘normal’ life. By the time most people reach their mid twenties they have all but given up on their dreams or even forgotten what those dreams are. They have become conditioned into believing that they are incapable of achieving what they want in life. This fundamental belief forms the foundation of their self image and the rest of their mental attitudes are build upon it!
It is the role of personal development and self improvement to remove these conditioned mental attitudes from your inner mind and free you to pursue the life course that you chose for yourself. Through the use of personal development and self improvement you can begin today to remove mental conditioning that you received from well-meaning family, peers and teachers. In addition you will also be directed to remove all those negative mental attitudes that have been given to you by not so well-meaning people and those you have developed yourself through negative life experiences. Although this is not always an easy or pleasurable journey to take the rewards that you will experience from taking it are immeasurable and make it truly worthwhile.
The freedom that you can experience from removing just one negative mental and negative emotional pattern is akin to the feeling of rest and tranquillity you feel after extreme physical exercise. Removing numerous negative mental attitudes and emotional stress from your mind and body is a feeling and experience that is truly hard to describe to someone who has never experienced it themselves.
Jesus Christ said, “seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you”: Matthew 6:33. By removing the negative mental and emotional attitudes from your mind you free yourself to reach your goals. Let me explain.
For instance you may have a desire to be wealthy and thus set a personal development goal to become financially free. There are thousands of different ways to achieve this goal. There are thousands of methods you could follow and plans you could set in motion that would bring you closer to this goal. Millions of people have gone from rags to riches. So, why does following a plan work for one person and the same plan will not work for another?
It is due entirely to the difference in attitude and mental conditioning!
There are at your disposal numerous personal development and self improvement methods that are designed to help you achieve this goal. Now these tools and methods are not designed to show you the way to become financially free but instead are designed to free you from your own inner resistance to being financially free. Many people think this is a waste of time and would prefer to be given step by step instructions to build financial wealth and I was once one of them. However, it didn’t matter how much effort I used or how many ‘guaranteed’ formulas I followed my financial situations did not improve and many times actually grew worse.
Why was this? Were the plans I was following just not good enough to create wealth? Were the people peddling these rags to riches methods merely conning me out of my money? Was gaining wealth just pure luck like winning the lottery?
The answer to all of the above questions is no!
The plans I followed had worked for thousands and made them rich! The people selling me the products and methods had all made their fortunes using the very same techniques they were trying to teach me! It was only after a great deal of hradship and many learning lessons that I discovered the truth – gaining wealth has nothing to do with being lucky!
It wasn’t that these things were not good enough to produce the wealth I craved it was that I THOUGHT I wasn’t good enough. When you hold a negative self image and have a negative view of yourself and your abilities it is very difficuly to achieve success no matter how much effort you put into it! This is why it is of paramount importance to first remove the negative conditioning that is holding you back in life.
Your attitude, which is only composed of thoughts and feelings, is responsible for your actions. Thought is the creator of action! Every action you perform, no matter how small or big, first begins in your mind as a thought. Each thought begins as a feeling. Think of when you met your last partner. You first felt the attraction. This developed into a thought or series of thoughts about meeting the person. Then you performed some action to make that happen. Bring to mind a time when you meet with your friends to have a social gathering. You had the feeling that you would like to have some fun, or be with your friends, were feeling lonely etc. Then you had the thought. Then you performed the action.
If your actions are motivated by your thoughts and feelings and your attitude is composed of thoughts and feelings do you think you could succeed at a given task if you hold a negative mental attitude about it or your ability to succeed at it?
Once you embrace personal development and begin to use any of the myriad of self improvement tools to remove your negative mental attitudes you will naturally find yourself becoming more successful in life. You actions will be more positive and you will unconsciously perform the correct actions that will lead you to success. I am sure you can know see how important it is to set some personal development goals. Not only will you see improvement in your self, you will also see many symptoms of success added unto you!
