PERSONAL GROWTH

This video is about personal growth, please let me know if you like it!

Motivation & Productivity: 3 Self Help Improvement Strategies. Personal ...

This video is about self-help improvement strategies, please let me know if you like it!

If you're tired of starting over, WATCH THIS before YOU GIVE UP !

This video is great, it will change your life, please let me know if you like it!

Motivation & Productivity: 3 Self Help Improvement Strategies. Personal ...

This video is about motivation and productivity!  Please let me know if you like it!

The Most Powerful Mindset for Success

Ths video is about the most powerful mindset!

Three Ways to a Growth Mindset

This video is excellent for parents and anyone who works with children, please let me know if you like it!

Growth Mindset

A growth mindset is key, this video is great if you want to know more about mindset!  Please let me know if you like it!

A COMMON MISTAKE FOR PERSONAL GROWTH NEWBIES

A common mistake for personal growth newbies is to wrap one’s self-esteem into short-term results. This often leads to self-blame and excess worry when results are below expectations.

If we use the lenses of truth, love, and power (our fundamental growth principles), we can see why beating yourself up for mistakes and failure is an ineffective approach that doesn’t actually help you grow.

The Truth Lens

When viewed through the truth lens, we can readily see why beating ourselves up for mistakes will only make things worse. Since all input serves as a form of programming for our brains, it’s predictable that negative self-talk, especially when it becomes habitual, will serve to lower our future performance. We’re essentially programming ourselves to perform poorly when we use negative self-talk. We behave like a computer that installs a virus to slow itself down.

When you make mistakes, blaming yourself as an individual isn’t a very useful way to address problems. Problems could have been caused by circumstances outside of your control. Even if you made a mistake due to ignorance or poor performance, it’s more intelligent to view such a mistake as a software problem. Something in your thinking or behavior caused the problem, and therefore your best bet is to work on improving your thoughts and behaviors (i.e. your mental software), so you can avoid similar problems in the future.

As a human being with a human brain, you’re a learning machine. There isn’t much value in a learning machine that programs itself to lower its own performance. Trying to avoid mistakes would indeed prevent some mistakes, but mistakes are essential to the learning process. A learning machine that cuts off its ability to make mistakes would eventually become a static machine that’s incapable of further growth.

To continue learning and growing, it’s important to accept that mistakes are going to happen and that this is how you learn. You may have been taught or conditioned to believe from a young age that mistakes are bad and must always be avoided… or that if you make mistakes, it means you’re a lesser human being somehow. As you become more conscious and self-aware, however, you’ll recognize that these were foolish lessons that are out of alignment with reality, and you can consciously choose to discard such unhelpful beliefs. These beliefs are throwbacks to outdated thinking. Today we live in a knowledge-rich age where continuous learning and growth are more important than avoiding mistakes.

The Love Lens

Consider the consequences to your overall happiness if you fall into the habit of beating yourself up for mistakes. Does it make you any happier to wrap negative results into your self-image? What does thinking of yourself as a failure do for your emotional life? More often than not, such thinking will invite negative emotions like fear, worry, and stress.

If you wrap failures into your self-esteem, then you didn’t just fail. You’ve become the failure. You are the mistake. And this means you can no longer trust yourself to make intelligent decisions going forward. You have to expect further failure and therefore further negative impact to your self-esteem. This is a stressful proposition, and it’s going to encourage you to hold back from stretching yourself. You’re probably not going to risk further damage to your self-esteem. The more you try, the more you risk failure, and therefore the more you invite further degradation of your self-image. This will most likely lead you to tighten up when it comes to taking otherwise worthwhile risks. Your rate of learning and growth will slow down, and you’ll plateau.

The lens of love reveals that people grow fastest when their lives are aligned with their desires. Do you want to plateau and live a largely static life for your remaining decades? Is this prospect in alignment with how you’d ideally like to experience this existence? Do you want to play it safe and basically remain stuck till you die?

Also consider the impact on your relationships with other people. If you get into the habit of allowing failure to downgrade your self-esteem, then it will be much harder to take social risks. Socializing is rife with failures big and small. Sometimes you’ll be rejected. Sometimes you’ll behave in a socially awkward manner, and people will notice. Such failure experiences help you to socially calibrate your behaviors, but if you can’t handle failure, then you’ll prevent yourself from achieving social savvy. You’ll remain stuck in that socially awkward phase, and that’s likely to lead to some degree of loneliness and a feeling of disconnection from others. If you aren’t so resistant to mistakes and failure, you can skill-build faster in this area, and you can enjoy the fruits of a rich and abundant social life.

Furthermore, growth-oriented people tend to cluster together, so they can encourage each other and grow faster. In such social networks, people don’t often make room for those who beat themselves up. It’s similar to nonsmokers avoiding smokers, largely because the former can’t stand the smell of the latter. Likewise those who drop into the downward spiral of low self-esteem will tend to attract social connections that resonate with such patterns, such as abusers and other negative minded folks. Your social network will eventually reflect your neural network.

Like it or not, the social and emotional consequences of beating yourself up for failure can be severe. And overcoming such behavior can feel like digging yourself out of a pit when you’ve attracted a social situation that reinforces your current plateau or downward spiral.

The Power Lens

Beating yourself up for mistakes is disempowering as well. Imagine if Siri behaved this way. What if each time you asked her for help and she made a mistake, she beat herself up, and over time she began updating her programming to try to avoid making more mistakes? Eventually Siri would start to sound like the character Sadness from the Pixar movie Inside Out.

Do you know that Siri will sometimes defend her self-esteem if you try to harshly criticize her?

Do you forgive yourself so easily? Do you accept that mistakes are okay since they’re a natural part of the learning process?

Isn’t it more empowering to believe that you’re always doing your best? You can continue to learn, grow, and improve, but for right now, why not just accept that you’re doing the best you can? If you could have done better, you would have.

There’s no point in beating yourself up for mistakes. There is, however, much to be gained by extracting lessons from your mistakes and applying those lessons to improve your future thinking and behaviors.

Consider life’s challenges as a form of strength training. You wouldn’t bemoan the weights for being heavy. Heavy weights help you get stronger. They’re supposed to be challenging; otherwise you wouldn’t grow as much.

Growth vs. Self-Blame

Since self-blame is out of alignment with truth, love, and power, the practice will only slow you down. At best you’ll plateau, and at worst you’ll succumb to a downward spiral. To avoid such a pit of despair – or to dig yourself out of one – the solution is to regard yourself as programmable and to realize that your programming can be changed. Stop identifying yourself with the software that’s been programmed into your head. Recognize that just like Siri, you’re capable of learning and growing. You can upgrade your software.

Given the state of your current software, you’re already doing the best you can, and you can’t expect to do any better. Your mental and emotional software is performing as it was programmed. If you want to see better performance, then you’ll need to upgrade your software, and for human beings, this means training yourself with new experiences. This also means inviting more mistakes and failures as part of the learning process.

Can you make some grand mistakes with no loss to your self-esteem? This is a key challenge of conscious growth.

I’ve endured some grand failure experiences in my time. I’ve gone through a bankruptcy and a divorce. I was expelled from college. I was arrested multiple times as a teenager. I was kicked out of my apartment for falling behind on rent. I can come up with plenty of reasons to beat myself up. Yet my self-esteem is still rock solid positive, and I feel terrific about my path of growth. I learned a lot from those experiences, and without them I wouldn’t have the resilient mental software I now have. I understand that if I want to learn and grow, I have to allow room for mistakes and failure experiences.

In the years ahead, I expect to make even more mistakes. I’ll learn and grow from those mistakes too. I have to maintain this attitude in order to keep improving my mental software. What sense would it make to inject a low self-esteem virus into the mix by beating myself up? How could that possibly improve my performance? It could only improve my performance in the same way that being infected by a virus could. I’d learn to overcome the virus and become stronger as a result. This is an excellent way to frame self-esteem challenges – they show up to help you build even greater resilience.

Is this type of growth mindset normal in your life? Do most of your friends think this way? Most of mine do. Otherwise why would I want them as friends? What would be the point of having friends who will make me think that I’m somehow damaged or defective just because I fail now and then? In my life people with such negative attitudes are called “not friends.” 😉

Growth-Oriented Accountability

An important part of personal growth is accountability. When you pursue challenging goals, it can be especially helpful to have people holding you accountable – people who are keeping tabs on your progress. This form of accountability works well for many people. The extra social pressure can make success more likely. But sometimes we fall short. We miss a day. We don’t get as much done as we intended to.

In such cases there’s still no point in beating ourselves up. As we saw above, that isn’t going to help. Instead we need to look for ways we can adjust our programming to improve our performance. We want to analyze our assumptions and behaviors while avoiding the unhelpful practice of self-blame. Beating ourselves up isn’t the answer.

Accountability is a powerful tool, but we must wield it carefully. We need to avoid using it to give ourselves lashings when we fall short of our intentions. I think the proper use of accountability is to add positive pressure to get ourselves into the sweet spot of challenge and to feel strongly motivated to take action. Additionally, when we make mistakes or experience failure, we can leverage the accountability group as our personal brain trust to help us diagnose problems and make adjustments, so we can increase our chances of success going forward.

Accountability isn’t meant to be an additional threat to our self-esteem. The purpose of accountability is to help us learn and grow faster and more effectively than we could without it. It’s a performance tool.

Positive Reframes That Allow Room for Mistakes

When I was learning public speaking, one of the biggest shifts that helped me overcome nervousness was to adopt the belief that the audience is always on my side. The audience doesn’t want me to fail. How would that benefit them? Of course they want me to do well. I’m there to support the audience, and they’re there to support me. We all want the best for each other. If I make a mistake, it’s okay. People make mistakes, and sometimes mistakes are interesting to watch – even entertaining. As long as I recognize that we’re all on the same side, I’m free to relax and do my best.

Another reframe that helped tremendously was to think of myself as an explorer instead of an expert or guru. A guru sounds too perfect. An explorer is going to make mistakes because that’s part of the exploration process. What an explorer shares is always a work in progress because there’s always more exploring to do.

I also see an explorer as being capable of deeper honesty. The label of expert can be challenged, and therefore some might see a need to defend it. Can an expert still fail and make mistakes? It seems harder to create space for failure with this label. If you’re such an expert, then why did you fail? With this label there may be a tendency to cover up mistakes to protect one’s branding (or your own self-image if you start to believe the label yourself). Behind the scenes, experts are just as human as everyone else. They make a lot of mistakes. They procrastinate. They fall short again and again.

I like the explorer label because it feels more aligned with reality. Feel free to adopt it if you like it too. With this sort of label, we’re free to learn and grow, and we can screw up as much as we need to. You can fall off a cliff and still be an explorer. The label doesn’t need to be defended by the pretense of perfectionism. Even young kids can be explorers.

Going a bit deeper, I think it’s especially helpful to adopt the belief that the universe is always on your side. This is a very empowering lens for processing mistakes and failures. Why did life do this to you? Why did you have to go through tough times? It’s all just training to help you learn and grow. It’s strength training for your consciousness.

One of the most powerful reframes you can use is to apply gratitude where you might otherwise have a tendency to think poorly of yourself. Instead of beating yourself up when you fail, try saying “thank you” instead. Thank the universe for bringing you a meaningful growth challenge. Look at the weight that’s right in front of you, and feel some excitement that it’s going to help you grow stronger.

The more mistakes and failure you can handle without loss of self-esteem, the faster you can grow, and the grander and more expansive your growth experiences can be.

A common mistake for personal growth newbies is to wrap one’s self-esteem into short-term results. This often leads to self-blame and excess worry when results are below expectations.

If we use the lenses of truth, love, and power (our fundamental growth principles), we can see why beating yourself up for mistakes and failure is an ineffective approach that doesn’t actually help you grow.

The Truth Lens

When viewed through the truth lens, we can readily see why beating ourselves up for mistakes will only make things worse. Since all input serves as a form of programming for our brains, it’s predictable that negative self-talk, especially when it becomes habitual, will serve to lower our future performance. We’re essentially programming ourselves to perform poorly when we use negative self-talk. We behave like a computer that installs a virus to slow itself down.

When you make mistakes, blaming yourself as an individual isn’t a very useful way to address problems. Problems could have been caused by circumstances outside of your control. Even if you made a mistake due to ignorance or poor performance, it’s more intelligent to view such a mistake as a software problem. Something in your thinking or behavior caused the problem, and therefore your best bet is to work on improving your thoughts and behaviors (i.e. your mental software), so you can avoid similar problems in the future.

As a human being with a human brain, you’re a learning machine. There isn’t much value in a learning machine that programs itself to lower its own performance. Trying to avoid mistakes would indeed prevent some mistakes, but mistakes are essential to the learning process. A learning machine that cuts off its ability to make mistakes would eventually become a static machine that’s incapable of further growth.

To continue learning and growing, it’s important to accept that mistakes are going to happen and that this is how you learn. You may have been taught or conditioned to believe from a young age that mistakes are bad and must always be avoided… or that if you make mistakes, it means you’re a lesser human being somehow. As you become more conscious and self-aware, however, you’ll recognize that these were foolish lessons that are out of alignment with reality, and you can consciously choose to discard such unhelpful beliefs. These beliefs are throwbacks to outdated thinking. Today we live in a knowledge-rich age where continuous learning and growth are more important than avoiding mistakes.

The Love Lens

Consider the consequences to your overall happiness if you fall into the habit of beating yourself up for mistakes. Does it make you any happier to wrap negative results into your self-image? What does thinking of yourself as a failure do for your emotional life? More often than not, such thinking will invite negative emotions like fear, worry, and stress.

If you wrap failures into your self-esteem, then you didn’t just fail. You’ve become the failure. You are the mistake. And this means you can no longer trust yourself to make intelligent decisions going forward. You have to expect further failure and therefore further negative impact to your self-esteem. This is a stressful proposition, and it’s going to encourage you to hold back from stretching yourself. You’re probably not going to risk further damage to your self-esteem. The more you try, the more you risk failure, and therefore the more you invite further degradation of your self-image. This will most likely lead you to tighten up when it comes to taking otherwise worthwhile risks. Your rate of learning and growth will slow down, and you’ll plateau.

The lens of love reveals that people grow fastest when their lives are aligned with their desires. Do you want to plateau and live a largely static life for your remaining decades? Is this prospect in alignment with how you’d ideally like to experience this existence? Do you want to play it safe and basically remain stuck till you die?

Also consider the impact on your relationships with other people. If you get into the habit of allowing failure to downgrade your self-esteem, then it will be much harder to take social risks. Socializing is rife with failures big and small. Sometimes you’ll be rejected. Sometimes you’ll behave in a socially awkward manner, and people will notice. Such failure experiences help you to socially calibrate your behaviors, but if you can’t handle failure, then you’ll prevent yourself from achieving social savvy. You’ll remain stuck in that socially awkward phase, and that’s likely to lead to some degree of loneliness and a feeling of disconnection from others. If you aren’t so resistant to mistakes and failure, you can skill-build faster in this area, and you can enjoy the fruits of a rich and abundant social life.

Furthermore, growth-oriented people tend to cluster together, so they can encourage each other and grow faster. In such social networks, people don’t often make room for those who beat themselves up. It’s similar to nonsmokers avoiding smokers, largely because the former can’t stand the smell of the latter. Likewise those who drop into the downward spiral of low self-esteem will tend to attract social connections that resonate with such patterns, such as abusers and other negative minded folks. Your social network will eventually reflect your neural network.

Like it or not, the social and emotional consequences of beating yourself up for failure can be severe. And overcoming such behavior can feel like digging yourself out of a pit when you’ve attracted a social situation that reinforces your current plateau or downward spiral.

The Power Lens

Beating yourself up for mistakes is disempowering as well. Imagine if Siri behaved this way. What if each time you asked her for help and she made a mistake, she beat herself up, and over time she began updating her programming to try to avoid making more mistakes? Eventually Siri would start to sound like the character Sadness from the Pixar movie Inside Out. Do you know that Siri will sometimes defend her self-esteem if you try to harshly criticize her? Do you forgive yourself so easily? Do you accept that mistakes are okay since they’re a natural part of the learning process?

Isn’t it more empowering to believe that you’re always doing your best? You can continue to learn, grow, and improve, but for right now, why not just accept that you’re doing the best you can? If you could have done better, you would have.

There’s no point in beating yourself up for mistakes. There is, however, much to be gained by extracting lessons from your mistakes and applying those lessons to improve your future thinking and behaviors.

Consider life’s challenges as a form of strength training. You wouldn’t bemoan the weights for being heavy. Heavy weights help you get stronger. They’re supposed to be challenging; otherwise you wouldn’t grow as much.

Growth vs. Self-Blame

Since self-blame is out of alignment with truth, love, and power, the practice will only slow you down. At best you’ll plateau, and at worst you’ll succumb to a downward spiral. To avoid such a pit of despair – or to dig yourself out of one – the solution is to regar yourself as programmable and to realize that your programming can be changed. Stop identifying yourself with the software that’s been programmed into your head. Recognize that just like Siri, you’re capable of learning and growing. You can upgrade your software.

Given the state of your current software, you’re already doing the best you can, and you can’t expect to do any better. Your mental and emotional software is performing as it was programmed. If you want to see better performance, then you’ll need to upgrade your software, and for human beings, this means training yourself with new experiences. This also means inviting more mistakes and failures as part of the learning process.

Can you make some grand mistakes with no loss to your self-esteem? This is a key challenge of conscious growth.

I’ve endured some grand failure experiences in my time. I’ve gone through a bankruptcy and a divorce. I was expelled from college. I was arrested multiple times as a teenager. I was kicked out of my apartment for falling behind on rent. I can come up with plenty of reasons to beat myself up. Yet my self-esteem is still rock solid positive, and I feel terrific about my path of growth. I learned a lot from those experiences, and without them I wouldn’t have the resilient mental software I now have. I understand that if I want to learn and grow, I have to allow room for mistakes and failure experiences.

In the years ahead, I expect to make even more mistakes. I’ll learn and grow from those mistakes too. I have to maintain this attitude in order to keep improving my mental software. What sense would it make to inject a low self-esteem virus into the mix by beating myself up? How could that possibly improve my performance? It could only improve my performance in the same way that being infected by a virus could. I’d learn to overcome the virus and become stronger as a result. This is an excellent way to frame self-esteem challenges – they show up to help you build even greater resilience.

Is this type of growth mindset normal in your life? Do most of your friends think this way? Most of mine do. Otherwise why would I want them as friends? What would be the point of having friends who will make me think that I’m somehow damaged or defective just because I fail now and then? In my life people with such negative attitudes are called “not friends.” 😉

Growth-Oriented Accountability

Accountability is a powerful tool, but we must wield it carefully. We need to avoid using it to give ourselves lashings when we fall short of our intentions. I think the proper use of accountability is to add positive pressure to get ourselves into the sweet spot of challenge and to feel strongly motivated to take action. Additionally, when we make mistakes or experience failure, we can leverage the accountability group as our personal brain trust to help us diagnose problems and make adjustments, so we can increase our chances of success going forward.

Accountability isn’t meant to be an additional threat to our self-esteem. The purpose of accountability is to help us learn and grow faster and more effectively than we could without it. It’s a performance tool.

Positive Reframes That Allow Room for Mistakes

When I was learning public speaking, one of the biggest shifts that helped me overcome nervousness was to adopt the belief that the audience is always on my side. The audience doesn’t want me to fail. How would that benefit them? Of course they want me to do well. I’m there to support the audience, and they’re there to support me. We all want the best for each other. If I make a mistake, it’s okay. People make mistakes, and sometimes mistakes are interesting to watch – even entertaining. As long as I recognize that we’re all on the same side, I’m free to relax and do my best.

Another reframe that helped tremendously was to think of myself as an explorer instead of an expert or guru. A guru sounds too perfect. An explorer is going to make mistakes because that’s part of the exploration process. What an explorer shares is always a work in progress because there’s always more exploring to do.

I also see an explorer as being capable of deeper honesty. The label of expert can be challenged, and therefore some might see a need to defend it. Can an expert still fail and make mistakes? It seems harder to create space for failure with this label. If you’re such an expert, then why did you fail? With this label there may be a tendency to cover up mistakes to protect one’s branding (or your own self-image if you start to believe the label yourself). Behind the scenes, experts are just as human as everyone else. They make a lot of mistakes. They procrastinate. They fall short again and again.

I like the explorer label because it feels more aligned with reality. Feel free to adopt it if you like it too. With this sort of label, we’re free to learn and grow, and we can screw up as much as we need to. You can fall off a cliff and still be an explorer. The label doesn’t need to be defended by the pretense of perfectionism. Even young kids can be explorers.

Going a bit deeper, I think it’s especially helpful to adopt the belief that the universe is always on your side. This is a very empowering lens for processing mistakes and failures. Why did life do this to you? Why did you have to go through tough times? It’s all just training to help you learn and grow. It’s strength training for your consciousness.

One of the most powerful reframes you can use is to apply gratitude where you might otherwise have a tendency to think poorly of yourself. Instead of beating yourself up when you fail, try saying “thank you” instead. Thank the universe for bringing you a meaningful growth challenge. Look at the weight that’s right in front of you, and feel some excitement that it’s going to help you grow stronger.

The more mistakes and failure you can handle without loss of self-esteem, the faster you can grow, and the grander and more expansive your growth experiences can be.

A common mistake for personal growth newbies is to wrap one’s self-esteem into short-term results. This often leads to self-blame and excess worry when results are below expectations.

If we use the lenses of truth, love, and power (our fundamental growth principles), we can see why beating yourself up for mistakes and failure is an ineffective approach that doesn’t actually help you grow.

The Truth Lens

When viewed through the truth lens, we can readily see why beating ourselves up for mistakes will only make things worse. Since all input serves as a form of programming for our brains, it’s predictable that negative self-talk, especially when it becomes habitual, will serve to lower our future performance. We’re essentially programming ourselves to perform poorly when we use negative self-talk. We behave like a computer that installs a virus to slow itself down.

When you make mistakes, blaming yourself as an individual isn’t a very useful way to address problems. Problems could have been caused by circumstances outside of your control. Even if you made a mistake due to ignorance or poor performance, it’s more intelligent to view such a mistake as a software problem. Something in your thinking or behavior caused the problem, and therefore your best bet is to work on improving your thoughts and behaviors (i.e. your mental software), so you can avoid similar problems in the future.

As a human being with a human brain, you’re a learning machine. There isn’t much value in a learning machine that programs itself to lower its own performance. Trying to avoid mistakes would indeed prevent some mistakes, but mistakes are essential to the learning process. A learning machine that cuts off its ability to make mistakes would eventually become a static machine that’s incapable of further growth.

To continue learning and growing, it’s important to accept that mistakes are going to happen and that this is how you learn. You may have been taught or conditioned to believe from a young age that mistakes are bad and must always be avoided… or that if you make mistakes, it means you’re a lesser human being somehow. As you become more conscious and self-aware, however, you’ll recognize that these were foolish lessons that are out of alignment with reality, and you can consciously choose to discard such unhelpful beliefs. These beliefs are throwbacks to outdated thinking. Today we live in a knowledge-rich age where continuous learning and growth are more important than avoiding mistakes.

The Love Lens

Consider the consequences to your overall happiness if you fall into the habit of beating yourself up for mistakes. Does it make you any happier to wrap negative results into your self-image? What does thinking of yourself as a failure do for your emotional life? More often than not, such thinking will invite negative emotions like fear, worry, and stress.

If you wrap failures into your self-esteem, then you didn’t just fail. You’ve become the failure. You are the mistake. And this means you can no longer trust yourself to make intelligent decisions going forward. You have to expect further failure and therefore further negative impact to your self-esteem. This is a stressful proposition, and it’s going to encourage you to hold back from stretching yourself. You’re probably not going to risk further damage to your self-esteem. The more you try, the more you risk failure, and therefore the more you invite further degradation of your self-image. This will most likely lead you to tighten up when it comes to taking otherwise worthwhile risks. Your rate of learning and growth will slow down, and you’ll plateau.

The lens of love reveals that people grow fastest when their lives are aligned with their desires. Do you want to plateau and live a largely static life for your remaining decades? Is this prospect in alignment with how you’d ideally like to experience this existence? Do you want to play it safe and basically remain stuck till you die?

Also consider the impact on your relationships with other people. If you get into the habit of allowing failure to downgrade your self-esteem, then it will be much harder to take social risks. Socializing is rife with failures big and small. Sometimes you’ll be rejected. Sometimes you’ll behave in a socially awkward manner, and people will notice. Such failure experiences help you to socially calibrate your behaviors, but if you can’t handle failure, then you’ll prevent yourself from achieving social savvy. You’ll remain stuck in that socially awkward phase, and that’s likely to lead to some degree of loneliness and a feeling of disconnection from others. If you aren’t so resistant to mistakes and failure, you can skill-build faster in this area, and you can enjoy the fruits of a rich and abundant social life.

Furthermore, growth-oriented people tend to cluster together, so they can encourage each other and grow faster. In such social networks, people don’t often make room for those who beat themselves up. It’s similar to nonsmokers avoiding smokers, largely because the former can’t stand the smell of the latter. Likewise those who drop into the downward spiral of low self-esteem will tend to attract social connections that resonate with such patterns, such as abusers and other negative minded folks. Your social network will eventually reflect your neural network.

Like it or not, the social and emotional consequences of beating yourself up for failure can be severe. And overcoming such behavior can feel like digging yourself out of a pit when you’ve attracted a social situation that reinforces your current plateau or downward spiral.

The Power Lens

Beating yourself up for mistakes is disempowering as well. Imagine if Siri behaved this way. What if each time you asked her for help and she made a mistake, she beat herself up, and over time she began updating her programming to try to avoid making more mistakes? Eventually Siri would start to sound like the character Sadness from the Pixar movie Inside Out. Do you know that Siri will sometimes defend her self-esteem if you try to harshly criticize her? Do you forgive yourself so easily? Do you accept that mistakes are okay since they’re a natural part of the learning process?

Isn’t it more empowering to believe that you’re always doing your best? You can continue to learn, grow, and improve, but for right now, why not just accept that you’re doing the best you can? If you could have done better, you would have.

There’s no point in beating yourself up for mistakes. There is, however, much to be gained by extracting lessons from your mistakes and applying those lessons to improve your future thinking and behaviors.

Consider life’s challenges as a form of strength training. You wouldn’t bemoan the weights for being heavy. Heavy weights help you get stronger. They’re supposed to be challenging; otherwise you wouldn’t grow as much.

Growth vs. Self-Blame

Since self-blame is out of alignment with truth, love, and power, the practice will only slow you down. At best you’ll plateau, and at worst you’ll succumb to a downward spiral. To avoid such a pit of despair – or to dig yourself out of one – the solution is to regard yourself as programmable and to realize that your programming can be changed. Stop identifying yourself with the software that’s been programmed into your head. Recognize that just like Siri, you’re capable of learning and growing. You can upgrade your software.

Given the state of your current software, you’re already doing the best you can, and you can’t expect to do any better. Your mental and emotional software is performing as it was programmed. If you want to see better performance, then you’ll need to upgrade your software, and for human beings, this means training yourself with new experiences. This also means inviting more mistakes and failures as part of the learning process.

Can you make some grand mistakes with no loss to your self-esteem? This is a key challenge of conscious growth.

I’ve endured some grand failure experiences in my time. I’ve gone through a bankruptcy and a divorce. I was expelled from college. I was arrested multiple times as a teenager. I was kicked out of my apartment for falling behind on rent. I can come up with plenty of reasons to beat myself up. Yet my self-esteem is still rock solid positive, and I feel terrific about my path of growth. I learned a lot from those experiences, and without them I wouldn’t have the resilient mental software I now have. I understand that if I want to learn and grow, I have to allow room for mistakes and failure experiences.

In the years ahead, I expect to make even more mistakes. I’ll learn and grow from those mistakes too. I have to maintain this attitude in order to keep improving my mental software. What sense would it make to inject a low self-esteem virus into the mix by beating myself up? How could that possibly improve my performance? It could only improve my performance in the same way that being infected by a virus could. I’d learn to overcome the virus and become stronger as a result. This is an excellent way to frame self-esteem challenges – they show up to help you build even greater resilience.

Is this type of growth mindset normal in your life? Do most of your friends think this way? Most of mine do. Otherwise why would I want them as friends? What would be the point of having friends who will make me think that I’m somehow damaged or defective just because I fail now and then? In my life people with such negative attitudes are called “not friends.” 😉

Growth-Oriented Accountability

An important part of personal growth is accountability. When you pursue challenging goals, it can be especially helpful to have people holding you accountable – people who are keeping tabs on your progress. This form of accountability works well for many people. The extra social pressure can make success more likely. But sometimes we fall short. We miss a day. We don’t get as much done as we intended to.

In such cases there’s still no point in beating ourselves up. As we saw above, that isn’t going to help. Instead we need to look for ways we can adjust our programming to improve our performance. We want to analyze our assumptions and behaviors while avoiding the unhelpful practice of self-blame. Beating ourselves up isn’t the answer.

Accountability is a powerful tool, but we must wield it carefully. We need to avoid using it to give ourselves lashings when we fall short of our intentions. I think the proper use of accountability is to add positive pressure to get ourselves into the sweet spot of challenge and to feel strongly motivated to take action. Additionally, when we make mistakes or experience failure, we can leverage the accountability group as our personal brain trust to help us diagnose problems and make adjustments, so we can increase our chances of success going forward.

Accountability isn’t meant to be an additional threat to our self-esteem. The purpose of accountability is to help us learn and grow faster and more effectively than we could without it. It’s a performance tool.

Positive Reframes That Allow Room for Mistakes

When I was learning public speaking, one of the biggest shifts that helped me overcome nervousness was to adopt the belief that the audience is always on my side. The audience doesn’t want me to fail. How would that benefit them? Of course they want me to do well. I’m there to support the audience, and they’re there to support me. We all want the best for each other. If I make a mistake, it’s okay. People make mistakes, and sometimes mistakes are interesting to watch – even entertaining. As long as I recognize that we’re all on the same side, I’m free to relax and do my best.

Another reframe that helped tremendously was to think of myself as an explorer instead of an expert or guru. A guru sounds too perfect. An explorer is going to make mistakes because that’s part of the exploration process. What an explorer shares is always a work in progress because there’s always more exploring to do.

I also see an explorer as being capable of deeper honesty. The label of expert can be challenged, and therefore some might see a need to defend it. Can an expert still fail and make mistakes? It seems harder to create space for failure with this label. If you’re such an expert, then why did you fail? With this label there may be a tendency to cover up mistakes to protect one’s branding (or your own self-image if you start to believe the label yourself). Behind the scenes, experts are just as human as everyone else. They make a lot of mistakes. They procrastinate. They fall short again and again.

I like the explorer label because it feels more aligned with reality. Feel free to adopt it if you like it too. With this sort of label, we’re free to learn and grow, and we can screw up as much as we need to. You can fall off a cliff and still be an explorer. The label doesn’t need to be defended by the pretense of perfectionism. Even young kids can be explorers.

Going a bit deeper, I think it’s especially helpful to adopt the belief that the universe is always on your side. This is a very empowering lens for processing mistakes and failures. Why did life do this to you? Why did you have to go through tough times? It’s all just training to help you learn and grow. It’s strength training for your consciousness.

One of the most powerful reframes you can use is to apply gratitude where you might otherwise have a tendency to think poorly of yourself. Instead of beating yourself up when you fail, try saying “thank you” instead. Thank the universe for bringing you a meaningful growth challenge. Look at the weight that’s right in front of you, and feel some excitement that it’s going to help you grow stronger.

The more mistakes and failure you can handle without loss of self-esteem, the faster you can grow, and the grander and more expansive your growth experiences can be.

Growth Mindset Motivation

This video is powerful if you want to grow your mindset!  Please let me know if you like it!!

CHALLENGES FOR GROWTH

  

Daily, we face one challenge or the other. In our world with an estimated population of 7 billion people, no one is immune to, or exempted from challenges.

Most of us think challenges, also call problems by some, are created by factors, or forces outside themselves. This is not entirely true.

Well, there are also millions of people out there, who know from personal experience that whatever challenges facing them are caused by them and not entirely by outside factors.

A challenge is a test of somebody's abilities, or a situation that tests somebody's abilities in a stimulating way.

This is one of the many definitions of challenge by Google and it is correct. Whatever your profession, vocation, passion, status, or position in life, you must face challenges, daily.

Face squarely whatever challenges you are going through and sort them out. We should not behave like the ostrich and hide our heads under the sand, pretending our challenges will go away, or does not exist.

I am just trying to remind my beloved readers and fans out there that when we face our challenges, sort them out, we grow in wisdom, experience and understanding.

Spiritual, emotional, physical, intellectual, and social growth come from solving problems, taking personal responsibilities for our thought, words and deeds. I am already sounding like a teacher, here. I hope I am not boring you. Sorry, if I am.

In my period of meditation, I read a statement from one of the many digests of The Rosicrucian Order, AMORC the other day.

It says the cosmic masters, who are silently serving humanity today were once ordinary men and women, like you and I.

These masters were problem solvers during their many incarnations on this earth plane.

Now, they are serving the great humanity, the great light, the cosmic, after they have been thoroughly illumined.

The great journey to illumination and service to God and humanity. This sounds good and acceptable to me. But, what do you think, beloved?

Challenges or problems, in most cases are not created by the devil, Satan, our enemies, generational curses, as some religious persons will want us to accept, whatever.

We attract these challenges to ourselves, with a genuine and deep seated, intention to grow in all planes of existence. This is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But, please do not accept it hook, line and sinker. Reflect on it.

Look around you and see those who are truly illumined, great, powerful, spiritual, successful, etc, you will notice that they are problem solvers and that they passed through many challenges and are still passing through.

Source: http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Emmanuel_Udom/2301912

Effecting Positive Change; Personal Growth and Development

Thi is a very good video because we often rush to set ourselves some goals without finding out where our starting point is.  So assessment is the most crucial part of the success journey.  So let me know what you think!!

HOW TO LIVE A HAPPY LIFE: 10 THINGS TO SAY YES TO STARTING TODAY

“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.”
Marcus Aurelius

“Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
Abraham Lincoln

“If you want happiness for an hour — take a nap.
If you want happiness for a day — go fishing.
If you want happiness for a year — inherit a fortune.
If you want happiness for a lifetime — help someone else.”
Chinese Proverb

Saying no is often the easier way out.

When you say no you can safely stay within your comfort zone. You don’t have to fear failure or being rejected. The scary unknown and sometimes difficult change can be avoided.

But if you say yes your life can expand and deepen. The yes allows you to open up your life to more happiness.

Today I would like to share 10 things that I have said yes to and that have helped me to become happier in my life.

Pick one of these that resonate the most with you and focus on making it a part of your life.

1. Being imperfect.

Trying to be perfect is setting the bar too high. It will be impossible to reach. And so you’ll lower your self-esteem. You may not feel very happy about how things are going in your life. Even though they might be going very well indeed.

Perfectionism is mindset that eats at you and your happiness. Saying yes to being imperfect can turn that around.

How to do it:

§  Realize the costs of buying into myths of perfection. By watching too many movies, listening to too many songs and just taking in what the world is telling you it is very easy to be lulled into dreams of perfection. It sounds so good and wonderful and you want it.
But in real life, it clashes with reality and it can harm or possibly lead you to end relationships, jobs, projects etc. just because your expectations are out of this world. I find it very helpful to remind myself of this simple fact.

§  Go for good enough. Aiming for perfection usually winds up in a project or something else very slowly or never being finished. So go for good enough instead. Don’t use it as an excuse to slack off. But simply realize that there is something called good enough and when you are there then you are finished with whatever you are doing.

2. Being you.

Not being able to be yourself, always trying to change for others or censoring yourself don’t feel good at all. It makes life feel so small and limited.

So how can you be yourself? Your environment plays a huge part.

How to do it:

§  Supportive people. Spend more time with the people who support your dreams, values and you. Or are at least neutral. And spend less time with people who always criticize you or you simply aren’t a good fit for.

§  Supportive and life-expanding influences outside of your everyday life. Change your environment not only close to you. Go further and spend more time with sources of information that supports your dreams and can give you information that expands and makes your life happier and more exciting. Find support from people you have never met via books, movies, blogs, forums and music. And spend less time with negative and limiting influences.

3. The things that make you come alive.

It is important to find some time and energy for the things that you feel makes you come alive.

How to do it:

§  Mix it up. Try something new, even if it is just something small each week. Eat the vegetarian dish at lunch if you always eat meat. Listen to some music that isn’t your normal cup of tea. Go out to a movie, café or pub with friends if you usually stay in at night. Or vice versa. Create variation and expand your comfort zone regularly in small ways to live a happier life.

§  Reconnect with what you used to love if it has fallen by the wayside. If you used to go fishing, paint or play the guitar and it really made you come alive then reconnect. Use an hour for it this week and see if it still brings you joy and makes you come alive.

4. Optimism.

Pessimism can really limit your life and bring it to a standstill. It can make it feel like there’s no point in trying because it won’t make a difference or you’ll just fail. It can create ceilings and walls made out of glass where there really are none.

Saying yes a more optimistic way of thinking can on the other hand open your life up.

How to do it:

§  Ask yourself optimistic questions. When you’re in what seems like a negative situation then make something better out of it by asking yourself questions that promote optimism and helps you to find solutions. Questions like: What is one thing that is positive or good about this situation? And what is the opportunity within this situation?

§  Start your day off on the right foot. As mentioned in tip #2, the influences in your life can make a huge difference. So choose to spend your breakfast time with an optimistic influence like for example a book, a blog or your mom. Or talk to someone early in the day that most often supports and cheers you up like a co-worker or a friend in school.

5. Turning negative self-talk around.

It is very important to keep your motivation and your self-esteem up to live a happier life.

Your inner critic may be one of biggest obstacles standing in your way of that. If you make a mistake or fail, if someone criticizes you or if you are just getting tired then that small inner voice can become louder and louder and drag and keep you down.

It can tell you that you are stupid or lazy. That you will not succeed. That you are worse or uglier than someone else.

Being able to turn the inner critic around or to shut it up as soon as it pops up is a very helpful skill.

How to do it:

§  Say stop. Simply create a stop word or stop-phrase that you say or shout in your mind whenever your critic pipes up with a distorted and self-esteem hurting thought. Say: Stop! Or: No, no, no, we are not going there again!

§  Explain to yourself what this will lead to over the next year or more. As I mentioned in tip #1, reminding yourself of the cost of buying into myths of perfection is a powerful way to replace those thought habits. This works very well for other self-esteem hurting thought patterns too. Remind yourself of how the inner critic has shaped your life so far. And in your mind see the cost of letting it roam free for another year or five.

6. Saying no when you feel it is the right thing for you to do.

To have the time and energy to say yes to the most important things you have to say no to some things too.

How to do it:

§  What do I truly want to focus my time and energy on? When you get an offer or an opportunity arises ask yourself this question. When you look at your schedule ask yourself this question. Think about and look at what your top priorities are and what you deep want before you say anything.

§  Disarm and then state your need. It becomes easier for people to accept your no if you disarm them first. You could, for example, do that by honestly saying that you are flattered or that you appreciate the kind offer. Then you, for instance, add that you do not have the time for accepting and doing what they want. Or say that you do not feel that this offer is a good fit for your life right now.

7. Forgiveness.

Not clinging to the past and to the hurt that is there but to let it go and look to the now and the future is an essential thing to find more happiness in your life.

Forgiving is not always easy and can take time but there are some things that can make it a little easier.

How to do it:

§  Remind yourself that you forgive for your own benefit. As long as you don’t forgive someone you are linked to that person. Your thoughts will return to the person who wronged you and what he or she did over and over again.
The emotional link between the two of you is so strong and inflicts much suffering in you and – as a result of your inner turmoil – most often in other people around you too. When you forgive you do not only release the other person. You set yourself free from all of that agony too.

§  Make a habit of forgiving yourself. Do not just forgive others but also yourself. By forgiving yourself – instead of resenting yourself for something you did a week or 10 years ago – you make the habit of forgiveness more and more of a natural part of you. And so forgiving others becomes easier too.

8. Making someone else happy.

Making someone else happier has many benefits. The happiness spreads back to you as you see his or her face light up and as you know you did the right thing.

It spreads back to you as people have a strong tendency to want to give back when you have done something good for them. And it spreads out into the world as that now happier person may spread his or her happiness to other people.

How to do it:

§  Help out practically. Lend someone a hand when they are moving. Or give them a ride in your car. Or if they need information, try to find a solution by asking the people you know or via Google.

§  Just listen. Sometimes a friend or someone close to you may just want to vent or for someone to listen as he or she figures things out. It may not seem like much but it can be an immense help for someone who needs it. So be there fully – don’t sit there thinking about something else – and listen.

9. Openness and growth.

Saying yes to being open to the good things in life and growing as a person plays a big role when it comes to happiness.

The other things in this article will help you with that. But here are two more tips that will make your journey a little easier and simpler.

How to do it:

§  Change one thing at a time. Changing many things or your whole life at once sure sounds good. But willpower is something we often overestimate and everyday life tends to come in the way. So to make sure you have a much better chance of changing a habit or area of your life change just one thing at a time.

§  Start small. Just say no to one small thing you don’t want to do this week. Or forgive one person for one thing. Or help and make someone happy in some small way. Take just one small step outside of your comfort zone.

10. To live your life fully despite setbacks.

When things have been standing still for while or you hit a bump in the road then it’s easy to back down. To shrink. To give in or give up.

But a better way to say yes to happiness in those situations is to say yes to living your life fully.

How to do it:

§  Keep going. When you fail or make a mistake don’t give up. Reconnect with optimism by using the questions further up in this article. Find inspiration from books and blogs and the people around you. Don’t beat yourself up. Instead nudge yourself back on track again.

§  Remember, it’s not too late to change your life. I didn’t really try to improve my life very much until I was 25. And many throughout the world and history have made positive changes far later in life than that. So if you want to make a change then start today. Work with what you have where you are right now. Start small and take the first step towards something new.

Source:   HENRIK EDBERG on FEBRUARY 7, 2018

 This is an excellent article on how to change your life and focus on your happiness despite what else is happening around you!! Let me know if you like this article or not!!