A Starter’s Guide To Personal Growth: How Do I Improve My Life?

Making the change from being an occasional learner to becoming someone dedicated to personal growth goes against the grain of the way most people live. If you asked one hundred people how many books they have read on their own since leaving school (college or high school), I bet only a few would say they have read more than one or two books. If you asked how many watch motivational videos on YouTube and listen to podcasts and voluntarily attend seminars and training programs  to grow personally, there would be even fewer. Most people celebrate when they receive their certificates, diplomas or degrees and say to themselves, “Thank God that’s over. Just let me have a good job. I’m finished with studying.” But such thinking doesn’t take you any higher than average. If you want to be successful, you have to keep growing.

As someone who is dedicated to personal growth and development, I’d like to help you make the leap to becoming a dedicated self-developer. It’s the way you need to go if you want to reach your potential. Besides that, it also has another benefit: it brings contentment. The  happiest people I know are growing every day.

Take a look at the following eight principles. They’ll help you develop into a person dedicated to personal growth:

• Choose A Life Of Growth

It’s said that when Spanish composer-cellist Pablo Casals was in the final years of his life, a young reporter asked him, “Mr. Casals, you are ninety-five years old and the greatest cellist that ever lived. Why do you still practice six hours a day?”

What was Casals’s answer? “Because I think I’m making progress.” That’s the kind of dedication to continual growth that you should have. The people who reach their potential, no matter what their profession or background, think in terms of improvement. If you think you can “hold your ground” and still make the success journey, you are mistaken. You need to have an attitude like that of General George S. Patton (United States Army in the second world war). It’s said that he told his troops, “There is one thing I want you to remember. I don’t want to get any messages saying we are holding our position. We are advancing constantly.” Patton’s motto was, “Always take the offensive. Never dig in.”

The only way to improve the quality of your life is to improve yourself. If you want to grow your organization, you must grow as a leader. If you want better children, you must become a better person. If you want others to treat you more kindly, you must develop better social skills. There is no sure way to make other people in your environment improve. The only thing you truly have the ability to improve is yourself. And the amazing thing is that when you do, everything else around you suddenly gets better. So if you want to take the success journey, you must live a life of growth. And the only way you will grow is if you choose to grow.

• Start Growing Today

Napoleon Hill said, “It’s not what you are going to do, but it’s what you are doing now that counts.” Many unsuccessful people have what I call “someday sickness” because they could do some things to bring value to their lives right now. But they put them off and say they’ll do them someday . Their motto is “One of these days.” But as the old English proverb says, “One of these days means none of these days.” The best way to ensure success is to start growing today. No matter where you may be starting from, don’t be discouraged; everyone who got where he is started where he was.

Why do you need to determine to start growing today? There are several reasons:

• Growth is not automatic. You can be young only once, but you can be immature indefinitely. That’s because growth is not automatic. Just because you grow older doesn’t mean you keep growing. That’s how it is with some creatures, such as reptiles. As a snake ages, it grows and has to shed its skin. But that’s not the trend for people. The road to the next level is uphill, and it takes effort to keep growing. The sooner you start, the closer to reaching your potential you’ll be.

• Growth today will provide a better tomorrow. Everything you do today builds on what you did yesterday. And altogether, those things determine what will happen tomorrow. That’s especially true in regard to growth. A man’s mind, once stretched by new ideas, never regains its original dimensions. Growth today is tomorrow’s investment.
• Growth is your responsibility. When you were a small child, your parents were responsible for you—even for your growth and education. But as an adult, you bear that responsibility entirely. If you don’t make growth your responsibility, it will never happen.

There is no time like right now to get started. Recognize the importance that personal growth plays in success, and commit yourself to developing your potential today.

• Focus On Self-Development, Not Self-Fulfilment

There has been a change in focus over the last four  decades in the area of personal growth and development. Beginning in the late sixties and early seventies, people began talking about “finding themselves,” meaning that they were searching for a way to become self-fulfilled. It’s like making happiness a goal because self-fulfilment is about feeling good.

But self-development is different. Sure, much of the time it will make you feel good, but that’s a by-product, not the goal. Self-development is a higher calling; it’s the development of your potential so that you can attain the purpose for which you were created. There are times when that’s fulfilling, but other times it’s not. But no matter how it makes you feel, self-development always has one effect: It draws you toward your destiny. Indeed it’s true that, the greatest of all miracles is that we need not be tomorrow what we are today, but we can improve if we make use of the potential implanted in us by God.”

• Never Stay Satisfied With Current Accomplishments

The greatest enemy of tomorrow’s success is today’s success. Thinking that you have “arrived” when you accomplish a goal has the same effect as believing you know it all. It takes away your desire to learn. It’s another characteristic of destination disease. But successful people don’t sit back and rest on their laurels. They know that wins—like losses—are temporary, and they have to keep growing if they want to continue being. Therefore, it’s important to realise that the things and ways which got you somewhere are seldom those things that keep you there.

No matter how successful you are today, don’t get complacent. Stay hungry. A winner knows how much he still has to learn, even when he is considered an expert by others, unlike a loser who wants to be considered an expert by others before he has leaned enough to know how little he knows. Don’t settle into a comfort zone, and don’t let success go to your head. Enjoy your success briefly, and then move on to greater growth.

• Be A Continual Learner

The best way to keep from becoming satisfied with your current achievements is to make yourself a continual learner. That kind of commitment may be rarer than you realize. If you want to be a continual learner and keep growing throughout your life, you’ll have to carve out the time to do it. You’ll have to do what you can wherever you are since most successful people get ahead during the time other people waste.

Learning something every day is the essence of being a continual learner. You must keep improving yourself, not only acquiring knowledge to replace what you forget or what’s out-of-date, but building on what you learned yesterday.

• Develop A Plan For Growth

The key to a life of continual learning and improvement lies in developing a specific plan for growth and following through with it. I recommend a plan that requires an hour a day, five days a week. I use that as the pattern because of a statement by Earl Nightingale, which says, “If a person will spend one hour a day on the same subject for five years, that person will be an expert on that subject.” Isn’t that an incredible promise? It shows how far we are capable of going when we have the discipline to make growth our daily practice. I recommend the following growth plan to you:

1. Monday: Spend one hour with a devotional to develop your spiritual life.
2. Tuesday: Spend one hour watching a motivational/leadership video or listening to a self improvement podcast lesson.
3. Wednesday: Spend one hour journaling and reflecting on Tuesday’s content.
4. Thursday: Spend one hour reading a book on leadership or self improvement.
5. Friday: Spend half the hour reading the book and the other half journaling and reflecting.

As you develop your plan for growth, start by identifying the three to five areas in which you desire to grow. Then look for useful materials—books, magazines, podcasts, videos—and incorporate them into your plan. I recommend that you make it your goal to read at least twelve books and listen to fifty-two podcasts or videos (or read fifty-two articles) each year. Exactly how you go about it doesn’t matter, but do it daily. That way you’re more likely to follow through and get it done than if you periodically put it off and then try to catch up.

• Pay The Price

I mentioned before that self-fulfilment focuses on making a person happy, whereas self-development proposes to help a person reach his potential. A trade-off of growth is that it is sometimes uncomfortable. It requires discipline. It takes time that you could spend on leisure activities. It costs money to buy materials. You have to face constant change and take risks. And sometimes it’s just plain lonely. That’s why many people stop growing when the price gets high.

But growth is always worth the price you pay because the alternative is a limited life with unfulfilled potential. Success takes effort, and you can’t make the journey if you’re sitting back waiting for life to come along and improve you. U.S President, Theodore Roosevelt boldly stated, “There has not yet been a person in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.” Those words were true when he spoke them a century ago, and they still apply today.

• Find A Way To Apply What You Learn

Jim Rohn urged, “Don’t let your learning lead to knowledge. Let your learning lead to action.” The bottom line when it comes to personal growth is action. If your life doesn’t begin to change as a result of what you’re learning, you’re experiencing one of these problems: You’re not giving your growth plan enough time and attention; you’re focusing too much time on the wrong areas; or you’re not applying what you learn.

Successful people develop positive daily habits that help them to grow and learn. One of the things I do to make sure I don’t lose what I learn is to publish and post it on my blog, ushaurismart.com. In this blog I have published and posted hundreds of articles. But I also make an effort to apply the information as soon as I learn it. I do that by asking myself these questions anytime I learn something new:

• Where can I use it?
• When can I use it?
• Who else needs to know it?

These questions take my focus off simply acquiring knowledge and put it onto applying what I learn to my life. Try using them. I think they’ll do the same for you.

Author and leadership expert Fred Smith made a statement that summarizes what committing to personal growth is really all about. He said:

Something in human nature tempts us to stay where we’re comfortable. We try to find a plateau, a resting place, where we have comfortable stress and adequate finances. Where we have comfortable associations with people, without the intimidation of meeting new people and entering strange situations.

Of course, all of us need to plateau for a time. We climb and then plateau for assimilation. But once we’ve assimilated what we’ve learned, we climb again. It’s unfortunate when we’ve done our last climb. When we have made our last climb, we are old, whether forty or eighty.

Whatever you do, don’t allow yourself to stay on a plateau. Commit yourself to climbing the mountain of personal potential—a little at a time—throughout your life. It’s one journey you’ll never regret having made. According to novelist George Eliot, “It is never too late to be what you might have become.”

Thank you for finding time to read this blog post, and I hope it will improve your life for the better. In our next article we shall discuss on how to grow in your career. Get ready!