Personal Development For Life

By Author: Mark Eyre
Total Articles: 8
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I'd like to have a cent for how often I've heard people in all walks of life criticicise any or all of the following:

* self help books
* Trainers and coaches
* Talking about feelings
* People wanting to better themselves
* Treating others fairly

I can hear the words reverberating round my head, as if they were said yesterday. Sentences like:

* "I'm too busy for this soft, fluffy stuff - I've got work to do"
* "Get your feelings out of this"
* "That lot are just a bunch of softies, and they are no help!"
* "Someone has to do this stuff, don't they"
* "Life is unfair"

Here are 3 reasons why self help is tough. In other words, why self help and personal development do benefit people.

1. Feelings are tough

Giving people difficult messages or talking about feelings is a difficult thing to handle. Some people avoid feelings in my experience not due to it being a load of mush, but down to it being hard and they don't know how to handle it. It takes courage to ask challenging questions or to confront yourself ...
... or other people. It isn't easy to combine this with empathy towards others. Instead of admitting they can't do this, or are uncomfortable, it's more easy to criticise the whole shebang as a waste of energy.

The trouble is that emotions may be difficult to manage sometimes, but frankly they are the only thing in human life that's worth it. What else is there? We pursue joyousness, achievement, happiness, love and friendship. All of these are feelings. Better discover this, unless you want to be like Spock.

2. The mediocre is not acceptable

When we don't take those difficult steps, we are in effect embracing mediocrity in our lives. Accepting mediocre performance from colleagues in the workplace. Accepting mediocre relationships in our life. Accepting that we won't develop from where we are. We might develop our understanding of something, but knowledge dates. Moving towards our human potential moves us from the baseline towards achievement, and that's personal development for you.

Our life might feel fair or unfair. It's self-help that enables you to deal with it, find the plusses in the situation for you, move on, and live a better life tomorrow. Which leads on nicely to my third point.

3. It kicks complacent short-termism where it hurts

Changing our approach or confronting others comes at a cost we are very aware of - it's disconcerting, and this discomfort is immediate. With this mindset, we delay things, or avoid the scerario. Worst of all, we use logic on why now is not the appropriate time to take action - the position might resolve itself, after all. Procrastination through rationalisation is what it is. The left side of our head has much to answer for, it produces the excuses we sell to ourselves so we can justify doing nothing to change things.

The problem is it kills us in the long run. Kills our spirit. Undermines our relationships as we aren't true to ourselves. Undermines our energy, as we put a lid on it to avoid upsetting anyone. Destroys our sense of self as we don't get to where we might have. Perhaps it kills us literally.

Self-help is focused on seeing long term, and pricking the lethargy balloon. It acts on the truth that many of us see at the end of their life - that it isn't what you achieved in life that you regret, but what you didn't do.

Helping yourself and others you know is not some soft and fluffy rubbish. It is actually rather hard and tough. It necessitates some fairly immediate uncertainty in exchange for an improved future in nearly every way. It exchanges complacency for vigilance. It exchanges the need to avoid hurting others feelings for a real concern for their long term happiness. It forces us to look at our own lives, deals with the fear that we might not like what we see, and resolves us to discover the good in ourselves and strive to improve the rest.

It is, in brief, the only place to be. I enjoy being here, and I hope you'll want to be here too. It can best be summed up in one word - Living!!
I own Brilliant Futures, and am a self development writer and coach. I help people develop their leadership, power and career to become the best they can be. http://www.brilliantfutures.net/