Personal Growth

I’m 20 years old, single, live with my parents and don’t go to school or have a job. Through the eyes of society it would be easy to see me as a failure. Indeed looking through the eyes of my 16-year old self I probably would have considered myself a failure. How could I be in this position, and what on Earth could I be doing with my time then? I’ll be telling you all about it in a series of articles entitled Personal Growth. Let’s start at the beginning.

PERSONAL GROWTH PART 1

After I quit college and literally had half a year of doing nothing ahead of me I, with help, worked out an epic schedule of how to spend every day. Every day I would be working from 9:45 to 16:30, be it on finding my life’s goal, finding a new study, finding work or working on personal growth. The first and latter of which have had the most impact on me. Searching for your true life’s goal and working on personal development are activities I would truly encourage everyone to do. And to me it was important that I got to spend so much time on them, far away from the responsibilities of work and college. This half year to me would be all about myself on a level deeper than I had originally imagined.

It’s like some strange mirror. You look at yourself and you see this person, but this person is not really you. You don’t understand his true motivations, don’t know what really drives him or brings him down, what makes him happy or sad. You know of him what you would know of a friend, perhaps not even a good friend. It feels like you only see the outside and the true person that he is, is buried deep beneath the surface, too far for you to see. Yet this person is you. Should you not know everything?

It would surprise people how little they actually know about themselves. It certainly surprised me, shocked me even. It made me feel uncertain of the person I was. But it also fascinated me. How could I know so little of myself, the person I had been for the last 20 years? I was dying to find out more because all the answers would be somewhere in there, hidden from me until the moment I would go deep enough to find them. The answers to questions as, ‘What is my true life’s goal?’, ‘How can I truly be happy?’ and ‘What matters most to me?’. I’m actually very glad to tell you that I have already found the answer to the former but I’ll tell you all about that at a later date.

It’s only been close to half a year that I’ve been truly working on personal development, though the first step was taken about three years ago. I still remember it very well. It was a short monologue, given to me, which lasted about 1 or 2 minutes tops. Yet it changed the way I look at life dramatically, for the better as well. But I’ll get into that moment in a later article as well. For now I want to focus on how I view personal development. This will get us into a nice starting position for future articles about the subject.

As I said working on personal development feels like looking in the mirror but from a third-person perspective. You have to take a look at yourself in an objective way, without judging yourself. This is way harder than it sounds but it’s the first step to change. See once you know what parts of yourself you like and dislike you can choose which parts to enhance and which to discard. These parts are not limited to health, hobbies, career and stuff like that. The deeper parts are about thoughts and emotions you may feel. How does it work with you? What makes you happy? What makes you sad? Which thoughts provoke what kind of emotions? This is all personal development on a deeper level, a level I had never imagined when I first started this all. This is the part where personal development truly becomes personal growth.

When I first started working on personal development I spent time trying to change habits that were either good or bad for me. I would spend more time on the good habits and less on the bad habits. This is an amazing way to change your daily routine and make you a generally happier and better-organized person, but it was only when I started to look at my thoughts and emotions that I truly felt like changing my life and myself. And this is where a lot of my time is going to lately. I’ve been reading books about personal growth and am trying to change myself for the better, even trying to control my thoughts and emotions, a feat I would never have assumed possible before I started this all. I could seriously talk about it all until I collapse, but I think I’ll leave it at this for now. As stated in the beginning of the post, this article was only the start of a series of articles further exploring my take on personal development and growth. I hope you find it as interesting as I do and maybe someday you will go through all these things yourself. Perhaps someday you’ll, like me, experience things you didn’t think were possible at all.