The Ripple Revolution (tm)

Posts tagged self-help

Making a difference: How personal development can maximize your impact

January 4, 2014 Written by Curt Rosengren

Is self-help and personal development the realm of self-indulgent narcissists who have the luxury of wallowing in me, me, me?

I sometimes run across people who think so. Typically, they’re well-meaning souls who see the world’s pain and are frustrated with seeing people lost in self-absorption rather than out there making a difference.

The underlying message is that focusing on oneself is, at best, selfish and self-indulgent when there are so many pressing problems in the world and so many people just trying to survive.

And to some degree, they have a point. I won’t deny there is a certain measure of self-obsession in the self-help world that can border on the narcissistic. But painting all personal development with that light is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The difference you make starts with you

Here’s what I absolutely believe. Every little bit of difference you make in the world – every bit! – starts with you. There’s no escaping that. Given that, the work you do in your own life can help you, for example:

  • Make a more positive impact because you’re coming from a more positive place
  • Have more to give (more energy, more ideas, more effort)
  • Stop getting in the way of the difference you have the potential to make
  • Have the courage to take action
  • Act from a more solid foundation
  • See the world clearly as it is (and less through the lens of your stories)

Personal development allows the energy to flow more freely and more abundantly from your life out into the world in the form of the difference you make.

Personal development helps you “be the change”

An oft-quoted admonition from Gandhi is to “be the change you want to see in the world.” I love the quote, but often it’s little more than a platitude. Ever see people deeply committed to peace practically frothing at the mouth in anger at “those people” and their injustices? Yeah, me too. They’re just creating more of what they’re fighting against.

Want to see more peace in the world? You’re not going to create it by being angry. Want to see more love in the world? It’s not going to come from being impatient and irritated.

What you bring to the world goes out into the world via the choices you make, the actions you take, the interactions you have, even the energy you send out.

Each of us was born with the potential to be a powerful instrument of positive change. Personal development helps us tune that instrument and fulfill that potential.

Avoiding the spin cycle of me, me, me

To be sure, there is a danger of getting caught up in the spin cycle of me, me, me, but it’s not inevitable. One way to avoid the self-indulgence loop is to keep coming back to the impact you have on the world around you.

One approach to this is consistently putting your personal development efforts in the context of making the world a better place. Two simple questions can help with this:

  • How does this growth enable me to make more of a positive impact?
  • How does this internal obstacle inhibit my ability to make a positive impact?

Keeping those things in mind will help build a bridge between your internal growth work and your external work in the world.

It also helps to keep making a difference top of mind so it doesn’t get left out of the picture. One way of doing this is to do a regular check-in with the categories in the outer ring of the Ripple Revolution model (the ways we can make a difference). You can look at each of them and ask, “How am I making a difference here? How could I? How do I want to?” It helps you both recognize what you’re currently doing and explore the possibilities.

Personal development is a vital piece of the puzzle when it comes to maximizing your positive impact in the world. The key is to see the full picture, building a bridge between the internal and external, and keeping the difference you make in your sights.

–

Join the Ripple Revolution TM

Brought to you by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst TM

Time for a career change? Start with
The Occupational Adventure Guide

Making a difference, Personal development
, , ,

Stop trying to fix yourself

May 21, 2013 Written by Curt Rosengren

Imagine being underwater, face mask and a snorkel at the ready and rarin’ to explore what’s there. But you can’t see a thing – the water is just too muddy! In frustration, you splash with your hands, trying to push the silt down to the bottom so you can see.

Does that make any sense? Of course it doesn’t. All you end up doing is stirring up more mud from the bottom. There’s no chance for anything to settle.

While the folly of trying to clear water by pushing the sediment down seems obvious, most of us do a variation of that in our own lives.

We all want to feel good, and often we spend copious amounts of energy trying to fix what’s wrong, only to have it rear its head even stronger. My brilliant friend Molly Gordon at Shaboom! shone a light on that self-defeating cycle in her blog post, Why I’m not sucking my thumb and other happy thoughts. In it, she says:

What I’ve discovered is that it’s not negative thoughts and the moods they produce that trip us up, it’s believing that we shouldn’t have them and trying to change them when we do.

Trying to change thoughts and moods expands them. When we innocently focus on processing what upsets us, we invest emotional and mental energy in the story, and before long the story is a novel.

Her suggestion? Rather than trying to fix those uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, just be with them. Don’t feed them, but don’t try to make them go away, either. As Molly notes:

…changes in our thoughts and moods are like ripples on the surface of a lake. Nothing essential is altered by those ripples. Even if the ripples become waves, the nature of the water is unchanged.

…Irrespective of how long a painful thought or feeling has been around, there comes a moment when it is gone. Even the longest and most involved dramas unravel in the light of insight, leaving us momentarily alive to our essential wellbeing.

That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot in my own life. A big focus for me right now is self-compassion work. I can be pretty brutal to myself when my inner critic gets worked up into a lather (something that thankfully happens far less frequently these days). Bringing more self-compassion into my life makes a big difference in how much that critic has to latch onto.

For me, what Molly is talking about is a big part of where the opportunity is. The less I take whatever I’m experiencing as a hard and fast reality, the less charge it has. “Oh, there I am getting spooled up about ____ again. Yup, that’s pretty uncomfortable. Good thing it’s not permanent.”

I’m not saying that sitting and watching the choppy water will make the pain go away – at least not immediately. But it doesn’t add to the disturbance and, with time, it gives the water a chance to actually settle.

Next time you find yourself getting worked up, take a deep breath and just notice. What do you feel? What sensations do you feel? What story is running in the background. Is the source of your distress really what’s happening, or has it triggered some other story you have about yourself, others, or the world in general?

As Molly puts it, “Nothing essential is altered by those ripples. Even if the ripples become waves, the nature of the water is unchanged.” Step back and give the surface disturbances a chance to exist, and then to pass. In time, you’ll find that deep, still water once again.

–

Join the Ripple Revolution TM

Brought to you by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst TM

Time for a career change? Start with The Occupational Adventure Guide

Authenticity, Overcoming obstacles, Personal development
, ,

Your life is perfect (now improve it!)

March 9, 2012 Written by Curt Rosengren

digging a hole
I have a love/hate relationship with the self help industry.

On the one hand, I love it because I know how powerfully positive the results of personal development work can be. On the other hand, the implied message is so often, “you’re not good enough the way you are.” There’s a hole you need to fill in. It’s like deficiency-based advertising, masquerading in a feel-good costume.

At the heart of that “not good enough” message is a should. You should be happier. You should be more ____. You should be less ____. You should achieve more. You should. You should. You should.

To avoid the soul-sucking energy drain of deficiency-based self-help, try using these three steps as a framework for your efforts.

Step 1: Accept

Listen, what we typically think of as perfection doesn’t actually exist in your life. And it never will. So doesn’t it seem like a big stinkin’ waste of energy to try to create it? Trying to achieve that personal development nirvana, where everything in life is perfectly in synch, is a recipe for getting the life sucked out of you by a feeling of insufficiency and lack.

What if, instead of trying to keep up with the self-help junkie Joneses, you took a completely different different tack? What if your first step in your personal development wasn’t change, but acceptance?

Acceptance of your current state can have an energizing effect. When you stop being pissed off about what is less than preferable, you stop spending on it. And energy not spent is energy you have available for more positive and productive things.

 Step 2: Appreciate

If you want a simple, immediately implementable way to improve how you feel in your life, start with gratitude. Research has shown that gratitude can have a significant impact on both your mental and physical health.

From a common sense perspective, think of it this way:

  • You notice what you focus on.
  • What you focus on grows.

When you start focusing on things to appreciate, you notice more things to appreciate. It’s as though things to be grateful for magically pop up like mushrooms after a rainstorm. In reality, they were already there, you just weren’t consciously stopping and acknowledging them.

The more you make a habit of gratitude, the more things you notice to be grateful for, and the more opportunities to be grateful you create. It’s a virtuous cycle.

Step 3: Improve

Just because you accept and appreciate your life as it is doesn’t mean there’s no room for improvement. There will always be opportunities for us to grow and evolve.

The first two steps helps you avoid deficiency-based thinking in your personal development efforts. It helps you approach it with a sense of building, rather than trying to fill in a hole.

Sure, there are things that need improvement, maybe even urgently. But there’s a big difference between “I need to remove this obstacle that is keeping me from moving forward” and “I’m not good enough as I am.”

Even though I outlined these three steps in a linear format, in practice they actually unfold simultaneously and continuously. Acceptance and appreciation is an ongoing effort to provide a solid foundation for your improvement to unfold.

[image by coljay72]

–

Want to join the Ripple Revolution?

 

Overcoming obstacles, Personal development
,