When you start this journey of personal development, it’s likely you are somewhat delusional and think that you’ll listen to a program once and then you’ll be an overnight success. You fail to realize that those who have achieved MASSIVE levels of success worked at it, often for many years. By dissecting my own journey a bit, I figured I could give you some insights.
Experimentation: At this point in the journey you are excited because the possibility of finally changing all this bullshit in your life that you are not happy with has arrived. You get your first Tony Robbins course or whichever personal development guru you prefer and you find yourself inspired. In fact, you start to find that some of the small things actually work. Then you start aiming for big goals which takes you into the next phase.
Doubt: When you start to affirm bigger goals and they don’t happen, you start to question whether or not all this nonsense really works and you convince yourself of nonsense such as “I guess this is my fate.” You are more or less unaware of the 10 signs that the matrix has you. Making the shift from doubt to faith is what separates those who make it from those who don’t.
Faith: The transition from doubt to faith is often the most difficult one because it’s during that period that “nothing is happening.” The life coach I worked with has said over and over again that it’s when you want to stop doing all this stuff (affirmations, visualization, etc) that you’ll make the most progress if you carry through.
Belief: When you act on faith you start to attract things into your life that make your belief in something get stronger. For example, I had gone through Napolean Hill’s Think and Grow Rich once before, but I didn’t quite get enough out of it. In the last few weeks I’ve probably listened to certain chapters in the book about a dozen times if not more. I have no doubt in the power of auto-suggestion considering people like Andrew Carnegie used these exact methods.
Achievement: In the last few months I’d been affirming “I earn 5,000 dollars per month in come from my blog.” In the last 2 weeks I’ve started lining up freelance work that’s leading to several hundred dollars extra per month, and I’ve reinforced my belief and got to the point of achievement.
As I’ve said before, the one reason all this crap never works for most people is because they don’t do it consistently. Once again, How often do you decide not to brush your teeth? `
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Great post! I’ve never thought about personal development in this way and I can really relate to these phases. Awesome!
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Hey Sri,
Wow I never thought of PD in those phases either. A very salient way of looking at it!
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@Dani: Good to see you back over here. I was realizing just the other day how all of my personal development had evolved. It also seems like this concepts could be applied to anything in life.
@Amit: I never really had thought of them in that way either. Then I looked back at the process of what I’ve experienced with it and the result was this blog post.
I don’t think everyone will make the same progress either. It’s never a continuous upwards climb, there are always peaks and troughs in our development and climbing back out of those troughs is the key, no matter how deep they feel.
$5000? Very specific! I’m just visualizing plenty:) I really hope we get there. I know you’ve put a lot of work in to it and deserve it so there’s no doubt it will come.
Hang ten when you’re not working, I will be:)
Good stuff. As I was reading I also recalled what I’d read in Napolean’s Think and Grow Rich. I also agree that the transition from doubt to faith is the toughest one. It’s so easy for most people to let their lizard brain do the talking (Shout out to Seth’s new book), and let their careers and/or lives stagnate.
Another great approach is Tony Robbins’ from Potential –> Action –> Results –> Certainty. It’s a never ending cycle and the more action you take, the more results you’ll get, which will make you more certain about the fact that you have potential to succeed again.
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@Annabel: I guess it’s almost synchronicity that you came to my blog today since this was the first time I’ve had a proper surf session since our storms. We’ve had nothing but rain for almost 7 days. Australia is on my list of surf trips
. There are definitely peaks and troughs to the experience.
@Ryan: I think to some degree that’s where I got the ideas from. I’ve probably listened to the back half a dozen times in the last 2 months. I’ve been tremendously action oriented with all my blogging projects and I’m starting to see the pay off now after about 8 months of work.
It’s clear you are learning the lesson as it is evident in the post. It seems as if you are living it which is nice to see. I fully subscribe to the “take small steps method” for personal development. Not doing this is somewhat of a condition of the fast paced society we live in now. Even if you are in a high pressure job, situation or personal need to achieve, you can hardly go wrong by slowing down and making small achievements. Your first four points ultimately achieve that. Nice post.
@Marc: I think that small steps method is really smart. It actually enables you to get past the doubt phase. The mistake I think I made was to jump from the small phase to the giant phase and then giving up when I didn’t think it worked. There is a post I’ve been wanting to write called “Slowing down will ultimately get you their faster.” Still brewing in my head.
Great post! I liked that you pointed out the following, “…you fail to realize that those who have achieved MASSIVE levels of success worked at it.” We see the success of people, but never what they went through. If they’re a great speaker and or writer, they can “show” people what they went through. I agree that you must have faith. This is tricky for most people.
@Rebecca: It’s interesting you bring that up because Untemplater did a great interview with Seth Godin the other day where he said “most of you don’t know about the 25 businesses I started that failed.” This is definitely tricky for most people I started three blogs before this which all bombed. But I learned, adjusted, found mentors and 8 months later here we are
I’m a big fan of the “find the right process and don’t worry about it.”
The worrying part, that’s no good.
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