Articles To Help You Cope, Grow, and Flourish Personally

• 8 Drivers of Your Best Life
• 10 Tips for Being Over 55
   
• AIDS: Ten Tips
• A Primer on Aging
• Allergies: how to deal with them, how to overcome them
   
• Are You Ready to Have a Baby?
• Baby Birthing Thoughts: Lessons Learned from Having a Baby
• Baby Naming Ceremony Tips
• Burn-out: Preventing and healing burn-out
• 10 Tips for Buying A Used Car
   
• Caregiver Guilt: Tips on Overcoming It and Taking Care of the Caregiver
• Comfort Zone: How to Keep Yours from Mastering You
• Correspondence Club/Special Interest Group: How to Start One
   
• Dating
• Dogs: How to choose a dog
• Effects of the Australian Gun Ban
• Eldercare: 5 Tips for Boomers
• Elder care: Taking Care of Aged Parents
• Elder rage: What to do when an aged parent is an angry parent
• Emotional Control
• Ethics or Obedience?
   
• Hiring an Attorney
• Infidelity: You can cheat, but you can't hide
   
• Kids: Make a Difference with Kids
• Lean body: How to have yours
• Learning: Six Steps to Successful Learning
• Memory Training
• Mental Strategies
   
• Paintball: Have fun while developing discipline and fitness (a tutorial)
• Peace: Finding Inner Peace and Creating Outer Peace
   
• Rewire Your Brain To Control Your Emotions, and Make Positive Life Choices
• Self-Belief
• Uplifting Moments: Stories of love, kindness, and encouragement

• Work Ethics: How far do you go?

When we talk about personal growth, what does that really mean?

To many personal growth writers, motivational speakers, and life coaches, this means coming up with a line of BS and jargon and inflicting it on people while collecting fees or royalties. Beware the charlatans. Not only will they take your money, but they will divert your attention from where it needs to be.

Personal growth isn't about shifting your paradigm, doing something "at the end of the day," or "impacting" other people (misusing the word "impact" is a wildly popular practice today).

What it's actually about depends on who you are, where you are, and what you are dealing with. But regardless of parameters, the basics are these:

• Identifying your personal opportunities to improve. What are you reasonably capable of achieving?
• Identifying which few opportunities are most worth going after. Not all opportunities are worth taking, and some are worth more than others. You can't do them all. You must choose one or a few and use your resources to get there.
• Making specific goals, with specific dates of completion. This is where many people fail. Vague goals don't motivate and aren't actionable.
• Develop a plan for achieving those goals on time and within budget (budget meaning time, money, and other resources you allocate to reaching this goal).
• Stick to the plan, but update it as circumstances require.

We started off by saying what personal growth is not and by taking a dig at many "providers" in the personal growth industry. But if you understand the basics of the personal growth process (meaning it's really your work that's going to make things happen), you can tap the enormous value that qualified and competent providers bring.

As an example, take Tony Robbins. He's got his critics, as all top providers in this industry do. Ignore them. If you listen carefully to Tony Robbins, you will find he talks about the basics we listed above. One of his strengths is he helps people shed the doubts and distractions so they can work through those basics (he has other strengths, as well).

As another example, suppose you hire a life coach. This person can't make you into anyone special. As Mr. Robbins would say, you already are someone special. You just need to figure out how you're special and how to use that for greater achievement and happiness. This is where a life coach can be enormously helpful.

If you need something less abstract to help you wrap your mind around personal growth, here's an idea. Sign up for six months with a personal trainer, preferably at a gym where other people are using personal trainers. Make mental notes of where each person is at the start; better yet, write it down noting as many specifics as possible.

Over the next 6 months, note who is taking the trainer's advice to heart and really working without needing the trainer to constantly supervise, motivate, and police them. And note which folks are just doing the minimum to get by.

After 6 months, compare the "start" notes on each person to where they are now. You will notice those who made the most progress used their trainer as an information resource, while those with the least progress seemed to expect their trainer to just about do the workout for them.

If you understand the principles revealed by this experiment, then you understand the principles of personal growth. Use our articles and other resource for information. Don't waste time shifting your paradigm, impacting other people, moving your cheese, or learning a dictionary of jargon. Focus on the process of improving yourself.