5 Quick Tips for Successful Personal Growth and Change

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• Tags: change, habits, Success, tips

Is personal growth and change hard for you?

I know that changing my behavior is not easy.  Of course, Socrates tells us, “The unexamined life is not worth living.“ 

In other words, one of the greatest thinkers that ever lived believes that the pursuit of personal growth is a mandatory activity in life.

If change is so important, then we better figure out how to make it happen.

5 tips to help you grow and change painlessly

“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.”
~ Maria Robinson

Successful personal growth and change is paramount to living life to the fullest.  Let’s face it, we all make mistakes, fall into traps and collect our share of bad habits.  There is no better time than right now to start making changes to achieve a better result in our daily life.

Of course, real change is often hard to accomplish.  That’s why I’ve scoured the blogosphere and collected some fantastic tips to make change painless.  These tips come from some of the best minds on personal growth so you know they’ll work!

Here are five quick tips for creating painless personal growth:

1.  Master your inner enemy

Jonathan at Advanced Life Skills recently wrote a great piece about our biggest obstacle to personal growth.  In it, Jonathan explains that we all have some very strong emotional resistance to change.  This resistance is a like a rubber band that constantly pulls us back to our established behavior. 

Understanding how we are preprogrammed to resist change gives us an advantage.  The better you know your enemy, the easier it is to defeat.  Knowing the details of how you inner resistance works will help you develop a successful strategy to beat it!

2.   Beat your paralysis and fear

Often we avoid even trying to change because we fear failure.  This leaves us paralyzed and stagnated.  Talk to anyone that has tried to quit smoking or lose weight and you’ll find people that are afraid to even try due to past failures.

Luciano at Litemind tells us we need to view things from a different perspective to overcome our fear of failure.  For example, he suggests viewing our attempts as stepping stones toward an ultimate victory.  After all, every time we fail we are learning from our mistakes and growing in our ability to succeed.  Those that persevere against all odds are usually the ones that win!

3.  Learn to avoid the trigger

Bad habits have triggers.  Some of the triggers that stimulate our bad behavior are tied to our environment.  Kendall at Revive Your Life points out that old habits die hard when we fail to recognize the triggers.  He quotes a recent study from Duke University that concluded that the environment plays an unequivocal role in changing a habit or instilling a new one.

In order to grow personally, you need to identify the stimulus that leads you to behave badly and then eliminate that from your life.  It could be as simple as staying away from certain people or keeping out of fast food restaurants.  Once you start avoiding the trigger, then your battle will become a whole lot easier!

4.  Keep it simple stupid (KISS)

Henrik at The Positivity Blog tells us that personal development information can screw with our head.  Many of us tend to overcomplicate matters making them harder than they need to be to solve.  We research and study the problem to death maybe as a way to stall and hang on just a little longer to our bad habits.

The old KISS principle is a great one to apply to personal growth.  A basic plan, even one that has flaws, that we act upon gets us much closer to our goal than simply studying the problem endlessly.  Keep it simple and you’ll make headway in no time!

5.  Break it down

Finally, I like the suggestion that Cath offers in her article on the art of changing easily and gracefully posted at Dumb Little Man.  She tells us to break our desired change down into small, achievable steps.  Incremental changes or baby steps are much easier to swallow than the whole enchilada.

Big changes attempted all at once cause us to be overwhelmed and stressed.  They also are much more likely to be strongly resisted by our inner enemy.  By breaking things down, you can lower your stress and the amount of resistance you will have to overcome!

Make personal growth easy and painless with these great tips!

These tips for personal growth are incredible!  They will help you skyrocket your way to success in no time.  They are sure to take the pain out of change and let you accomplish all your goals with ease!

What strategies do you use to grow and change painlessly?

Photo by gerlos