What is personal growth?
What are the benefits of personal growth?
How can I grow?
Those are questions that fortunately nowadays a lot of people ask themselves and other people. There is a growing need and sense for personal growth. So what is that all about?
Taking Control of Your Life
The first step in personal growth is to take control of your life.
The need for personal growth really comes to a lot of people who feel that they are not in control of their own lives. If you feel that you are just reacting to whatever is going on in the environment, just reacting to other people and their behavior, and you have these automatic responses like you get maybe angry, annoyed, sad, confused, or something similar, then you are mainly just responding to the environment and the people in your environment.
Therefore, to me, the first stage of personal growth really means that you take control of your own life. That means that you won’t let the other people in your environment dictate how you feel, what you should do and how you should do it.
Taking Control of Your Emotional States and Responses
In the first stage, you also take control of your own emotional states so that you can choose your responses. You won’t have those automatic reactions anymore when somebody says you something or does something.
When you realize that you truly do have the option of taking control of your feelings and your reactions, you really start to realize the potential that this whole personal growth has.
Taking Control of Your Thoughts
Taking control of your life really means that you start to take control of your thoughts. You start to pay attention to what you are really thinking about and how your thoughts then create your emotions and responses.
I would say that for most people, the number one thing is really to have less negative feelings and have more positive feelings. Your feelings are really created by your own thoughts, your own perceptions, how you view things, and what kind of meaning you give to things.
What kind of meaning do you give if somebody cuts you in when you’re driving? Do you get annoyed? Angry? Pissed off? Frustrated? You can choose also another reaction or response, maybe a more positive one. Maybe you might think, ”Oh, okay, maybe he didn’t see me. Maybe he was in a hurry. Maybe he was preoccupied. His thoughts were somewhere else.”
The point is that you can choose your perception and how you interpret whatever situations life throws at you.
Deepening Your Thoughts and Understanding
When you have gained some control over your thoughts and are becoming aware that it is you and your thoughts, your perceptions, that create your responses, and therefore your emotional states, then you start to understand the whole process and it is time for you to deepen your thinking.
That becomes with being more conscious. When you start to be more conscious of your own thoughts, your own emotional states, your own reactions, and your perceptions, the more you can also affect all those things around you.
We all create our own emotions and our experience of life. Therefore, with consciousness, you start to take control more and more of your life.
Taking Control of the Environment
The funny is that when you start to take control of your own behaviors, your actions, and your responses, the environment seems to change as well. Because when you start to act, behave and respond in a different way, the response from the environment also changes.
Instead of people telling you all the time what to do or treating you badly, the people around you start to act and behave differently. Instead of telling you what to do, maybe they start to ask you, what do you think we should do?
So with better awareness, you start to take control of your thoughts and your behaviors. And with that comes pretty much the next stage.
Letting Go of the Past
Once you have gained a better awareness of your own thoughts, your responses, your behaviors, your perspectives and so on, then the next stage is really to let go of the past.
Now, that might be another difficult point, because when you think about it, our thoughts, especially in the lower levels of our personal growth, are really based on the past.
We unconsciously constantly compare, for example, what has this particular event meant in the past. We compare things to what our past has taught us. And in order for us to really grow and become new, better people, we need to let go of the weight of the past.
The past is gone. There is really very little, if any use at all, thinking of what happened in the past. Instead, if you start to focus more on the present moment, your present thoughts, your new perceptions will form your new future.
Instead of just repeating what has happened, all those same paradigms, same patterns, and what you did in the past, as you let go of them, it gives you room to create a different kind of future. And that really happens with letting go of the past.
Let the bygones be bygones. Concentrate on the present moment and how your present moment can form the new future for yourself.
Practicing Forgiveness and Love
One part of letting go of the past and forming a new kind of present moment and future is also to cultivate forgiveness and love.
Start by forgiving all those people around you and forgiving yourself. We all have done stupid things. We all have made mistakes. Some are more profound, some are very light, but we all make mistakes. That is part of the growth. We try new things and sometimes we say bad things and so on.
Forgive the other people. Forgive yourself. That is such a huge load off your back and your heart. When you forgive other people and yourself, you will experience a lightness that you have never experienced before.
That also gives room for new thoughts and new feelings to enter to your life. And once you learn to forgive, you can replace things with love.
I have another blog post about love and what it is, so go ahead and read it; we’re not going into details here. However, the more you start to view yourself, other people, and life in general through love, it will change your life.
So, if you have come this far in your personal growth; you have really let go of the past, you have forgiven and you keep on forgiving because – trust me, these things come up constantly – and you have learned to love yourself, life, other people, and the whole planet that we live in, then comes the strange part.
Letting Go of Control
In the beginning of this blog post, I said that you need to learn to take control of your life.
Now, when you rise to higher levels in personal growth and consciousness, it’s time to let go of control.
What on earth do I mean by that? I just said earlier that you should take control of your life, and now I’m telling you to let go of the control!
By that, I really mean that instead of trying to control your environment or everything that you do, just let go and let inspirations really flow so that you start to behave and act more intuitively and by inspirations that somehow seem to come out of nowhere.
When you start to follow your intuition and those inspirations that you start to get more and more, and let them be your guides in your life, you really will transform your life.
Yes, it’s kind of counterintuitive for most people who are trying to take control of their lives to at the end let go of the control.
I don’t know what you believe in, but maybe there’s a higher spirit, higher source, higher power, or whatever you want to call it. If you let that higher power enter your life and be the guide, really wonderful things might start to happen.
And even if you don’t believe in any higher power or God, then yet you can also think of it this way: Our unconscious mind has way more knowledge than our conscious mind. Our conscious mind is really a small part of the whole functioning of the mind and brain.
If you start to follow your unconscious voice, then I pretty much guarantee you that you will achieve significant changes and significant improvements in your life.
So that, to me, is personal growth and those are the benefits of it.
Seek Help and Advice
How can you actually grow?
I would say you cannot do it by yourself. You need advice.
There is fortunately a countless number of books that you can read. There are all kinds of online trainings. There is personal coaching available. You name it.
And depending on the level of the personal growth you are in at any moment, you will require different kind of advice. Trust me, I’ve been there. I’ve walked the whole path.
In the beginning, in the lower levels, I really found a lot of help from NLP, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, to gain control of my thinking, my perceptions and so on.
Then I found meditations and reading about people who have experienced enlightenment or just following that kind of people and their advice as I moved on.
From Concrete to Abstract
The higher you get on the path of your personal growth, the more abstract everything becomes. In the lower levels, you need techniques and advice that are more concrete, advice to tell you specifically what you need do, how to change your thinking.
However, the higher you go, the more abstract things become. And you really just need to explore and experience yourself with the guidance of different people, maybe enlightened people.
I wish you all the best on your journey to higher levels of your personal growth. I guarantee you it is a path really worth taking and growing.
