The Book On Personal Development: 3 Stages of Growing Your-Self

By Dave Smythe and Raymond Aaron

The Book on Personal Development covers 3 stages of awareness that everyone actively working on themselves have gone through. It identifies what activities are likely to be needed while assessing where you may currently be in your own development and building on existing skills. Changes are always accompanying growth and the chapters identify a number of ways that these changes can occur. This book is ideally suited for the individual who is starting out on their own journey to success in life or those who are wanting to build confidence about their self development.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781772772111

Book preview

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Chapter 1

The Current You

"Life isn’t about finding yourself.

Life is about creating yourself."

– George Bernard Shaw

Learn to enjoy every minute of your life. Be happy now. Don’t wait for something outside of yourself to make you happy in the future. Think how really precious the time is you have to spend, whether it’s at work or with your family. Every minute should be enjoyed and savored.

– Earl Nightingale

When you commence on the personal development journey, you will need to really look at yourself. This is because it is you who ultimately controls your destiny in life. We will get into this a little bit later on in the book. For now though, what you need to do is actually figure out why you are where you are, in life, at this point. To do this, you will need to take a look at your life as it is now, and see how your life may have been impacted by all of the stimuli and environments over the years.

Now that you’ve started to look into your past, let’s figure out what’s made you who you are now. All people are essentially the same; we are all human beings. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, what religion you’ve grown up with, or what beliefs you may currently have; everyone started off the same way. This is a big thing within personal development, that you need to really understand before delving any further into this subject. What I mean by everyone started the same is, if you look at anybody anywhere in the world, from any gender, religion or culture, we start at birth. Everyone starts out as a baby; I don’t know any other way to appear on this planet. From this fundamental point, every human is the same: we are born a blank slate that is ready for learning.

In this infant state, it does not matter whether you are born in the richest country in the world or in the poorest country in the world, or what religion or culture you will learn about or be introduced to—you will absorb everything that is in your current surroundings. So, in essence, it doesn’t matter what creed or color you are, or where you happen to live; you are learning from what’s around you.

If you are growing up in an environment of only one language, whether that’s English, French, or Hebrew, you will learn that language with ease. In the same way, you will pick up anything that’s going on around you as you grow. You never think about learning a language as a child; it just happens. What else do children get exposed to that is not thought about? Everything you say or do, or how you act around children while they grow, has a huge impact on their development. The feelings you are having—the way you eat, the way you talk, the way you interact with other people—are all things that get absorbed and taken on board, and are learnt by a child.

As a baby, you were absorbing all of the environmental influences. Going back to languages, if you or any other infant were brought up in a household that speaks five languages, you would learn five languages. It doesn’t mean to say that you are going to learn 5 languages perfectly, but you will learn five languages well enough to speak them freely and with ease while with other people. If you only learn to speak one language, you will only speak that one language during the time you’re in that environment. Later on, if you wish to take on and learn another language, you can; although, typically, you may find that it becomes harder and harder to learn more languages as you age. We all learn to walk, primarily because everyone, as babies, sees around us are walking. That becomes a goal for us, but our interest in everything going around us obviously leads us to become mobile in any way possible. Babies want to learn and want to see where people are, so they start trying to move limbs with as much control as they possibly can to get mobile. Ultimately, mobility occurs because babies want to see everybody else around them, and see what they are up to. Curiosity is a great growth tool!

Once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you’ll start having positive results.

– Willie Nelson

Looking at growing up, from this aspect, and realizing, as we’ve grown up, we literally repeated everything that was done by those we grew up around. We were taking on board everything that we had been shown or had been said to us. This is why we become who we are; we take on the beliefs, actions, and the way of living from our parents, from our family members, and from our friends. Because we see everything while growing up as being normal, seeing it as being the norm feeds the understanding that this is how everybody else around us is seeing and doing things, in the same way.

The assumption then becomes that everyone else around the globe is doing everything the same way. As we get older, we start to realize that not everybody is the same, and do things differently. In the early years of life, this just causes a lot of confusion because we do not understand why people are not the same as us. Of course, as we get more exposure and experience with understanding that there are differences, we can accept them and realize that there are more and more behaviors, thoughts, and actions that people have that we don’t understand. Part of our growing up is to accept and understand that there are these differences between us and everybody else in the world, and then, move forward.

Unfortunately, not everyone around us understands the differences or even accepts them; this is part of growing up, and I’m sure you are already aware that there are other people who do not have the same beliefs as you do, and do not look at the world in the same way. We cannot get frustrated or angry at other people for not seeing things or believing in them in the same way that we do, as at this point, we already understand that everybody’s life, while growing up, has been different. From a child’s perspective, you have to grow through many different stages and many years to potentially get into environments where you see there are differences in people. If you were to look at a big city that is very active, then there are likely to be many different cultures, and many different languages being spoken. Certainly, in schools or neighborhoods where there may be lots of other types of people living with cultural differences, the experiences are more likely to be had earlier in life.

Where does this bring us now? From all our current life experiences, we have to take a deeper look at how our childhood has impacted us personally. Reviewing what has been said about how we’ve grown up, we need to take this information further, extrapolate it, and say, Hey, how has this made me who I am today? On a language front, what language do you speak, or how many do you speak? What was, or is, your main language; what was the language that was prevalent in the area you grew up, or the country you grew up in? What type of school did you go to, and did they teach multiple languages? Did they teach you which language to write and read first?

When were you allowed to play with the other children? What games were you allowed to play? What rules did you have to follow? When you did something wrong, how were you treated? When you were at home, what rules did your parents have for you growing up; were you allowed to drink alcohol when you were 18 years old? Were you allowed to swear? Were you allowed to talk back to your parents?

Looking at your parents, did they fight? Did they shout at one another? Were they abusive to one another (or to you)? Did you see them kissing and holding hands a lot? Did they wave and smile at neighbors and friends? What religion did you grow up with or learn about? What cultures were you exposed to? Did you find that you had friends and family that seemed to live by different rules, whether they were dictated through religious beliefs or through family climates, or even just social etiquette?

The point of this is to look at all of the experiences that we have ever been in, and this has led us to where we are in life now. That could be from a certain thought process or belief; which is to say how we think about the world and our surroundings is a function of our past. If you were to look at your life right now, what are your current circumstances? What job do you have? Do you like your job? What about the people you are around—do you actually like them? Depending on your age, you may be young or you may be getting close to retirement, but there is no right or wrong spot for personal development or finding out about yourself.

We all have different relationships at different points in our lives. For those who are just leaving school, you might have lots of friends that you hang around with on a very regular basis, which is great, or you might not. You could be in your 20s or 30s. You might be married and not get out as much on your own since you are a couple and have a really good relationship with your other half; or because you socialize so often, you might not really see them at all, even when you are together. If you are single, is this by choice or design? An older couple may potentially not see very many people at all; they could have a very full life or may just sit at home watching TV. The point is that your life is yours, and you have made it what it is. Circumstances up to this point have led you to where you are now, and it is your choices that allow you to move on from past experiences to where you are now, or to where you would like to be in the future, which could mean tomorrow or next year, or even 50 years from now.

I don’t seek discomfort. But, very often, you realise that what you fear is actually quite ephemeral; something’s different, something’s unfamiliar; therefore, it must be worse.

– Michael Palin

When looking at personal development, what we are specifically looking at is becoming better at either being ourselves or something that we wish to become. With the review that we have just done, you might be quite happy with where you are right now; you might feel that life is okay, or you might say, Wow, my life sucks, and I’m really not happy at all with where I am. Having this level of discomfort is good; it is not suggesting that we are wanting to be uncomfortable in life or that we want to be miserable. Being uncomfortable, however, gives us a reason to move forward and grow. The reason for this is, without any level of discomfort,