Personal development growth is achieved the moment you decide you want to improve yourself. A lot of people get hung up on keeping score of their current progress. My advice to those people would be to relax! Rome was not built over night (cliche' I know), but they were most certainly laying foundations every day! Whether you are wanting to lose weight, or earn more money, a common stumbling block is the attention to where you are right now. Growing is not a fast process, we didn't wake up one morning realizing "Wow, I'm a big kid now!". You grow incrementally over your life a little every day. When I decided to get into personal development and self-help as it were my initial thoughts were, "Hey this is great, I'm going to be everything I've ever wanted! Next week is going to be the greatest week of my life!". I was thinking very positively and felt great about myself all at once, but I started to fall back to earth receding back into old ways of thinking and old negative habits when I failed to notice progress. Little did I know just the tiniest burst of excitement and enthusiasm had germinated not just a seed but many seeds that went unnoticed until the first "sprouts" began to break the surface.
While I did find myself slightly discouraged that I had not manifested my wildest desires in my first week of attempting to better myself, I had been practicing the art of meditation regularly, not particularly noticing any beneficial effects other than relaxation and a clear minded sensation. Which was bigger than I really thought it was! I personally tended to get drawn to many different areas that I wanted to improve myself in. Music, business, art, health, relationships, etc. All with many different sub-categories that all called to me at once! It gets to be a little overwhelming and even disheartening when I realize there isn't enough time in the day to follow anything and everything that calls to me all at once! When I began to relax into the flow of life as I had been studying from various coaches and teachers, I began to calm down my excitable nature and find ease with where I was.
A little background to where I was in my life when I happened upon personal development, I was 24 living at home, I had no job, no money, no car, no meaningful relationship, no real purpose in life at all. I was always an introverted type of person and always felt socially awkward. Just a few of the reasons why I decided to look into this self-help business. To be perfectly honest I only began to notice changes in my attitude and my overall outlook on life when I started to consciously go for my ambitions. I still wasn't making any money, I wasn't noticing any substantial progress, but something definitely had changed inside myself. Now as I write this article it's 5 years later, and I don't even recognize myself! I'm 100 times more socially outgoing than I ever was my first 24 years of life, I'm self-employed, I'm in a wonderful relationship with the woman of my dreams, I just bought a new car, and I've never been happier with life. Mind you I'm not saying I've completed everything I've ever set out to do but the name of the game is growth and development, something I'm happy to say is happening in my life and can easily happen in yours as well!
Bringing me back to the purpose of this article "Personal Development - How to Tell You Are Making Progress", I just spent most of this article explaining I hardly ever noticed any progress whatsoever, but somehow it showed up. Here's how it works, you track your progress not in terms of physical manifestations, but in terms of HOW YOU FEEL. Changing your attitude is the key essential into changing your life. I know this is nothing new, I'm just here to testify that it truly works! I truthfully find I make the least amount of progress when I'm steadily trying to keep track of my own growth and progress, it just stifles the whole process. If you're constantly in the habit of keeping score and charts and graphs of your money, your weight, your life, it can very quickly bog you down into thinking negatively of your success and prospects for the future. I have a sincere fondness for the game of poker, one of if not the greatest poker player of all time, definitely of my generation and before is Doyle Brunson. Doyle would tell you to never count your chips! As I've heard him say it himself while in the midst of a high stakes game. Well why wouldn't you want to count your chips? The point of the game is to have the most chips! Of course I want to know how many chips I've got! Well here it is, you never count your chips because the game is eternally in motion, it ebbs and flows, the money comes the money goes. You can't ever trick yourself into thinking "OK, I've got enough chips now, I can slow down, I can win this if I just... STOP?". So my point with all of this is it is pointless to take score of your poker chips, let alone the progress of your physical LIFE, when the point of the game is truly to KEEP GOING!
How to tell you are making progress is truly in how you feel about yourself TODAY versus how you felt about yourself yesterday. Personal development GROWTH happens the moment you decide to plant the seeds of desire. Your job is to merely water those seeds with faith, and a positive state of mind. The power of the mind is one of the universe's, nay it IS the universe's primary instrument of expansion. The greatest innovators of science and technology are science fiction authors! What someone thought to be fantasy 100 or more years ago is REALITY TODAY! My point to you is whether you believe your goals and desires to be fantasy or not it just takes a spark of faith and an attitude of relaxed allowing to bring forth such into your experience! So rule number ONE, in tracking your personal development growth is to track what matters most, HOW YOU FEEL about YOURSELF today vs. how you felt about yourself yesterday. If you do that one little thing, you will blow your mind at how powerful you really are and how much of a difference you are impacting into your personal experience TODAY.
Knowledge is POWER! For MORE life enhancing information please visit http://www.donaldftaylor.com to request 100% FREE information regarding personal development, with tips and advice to help you maximize your growth!
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