A dialogue is circulating, attributed to a Tibetan story, that offers a possible answer to the question that heads this article:
- Master, what does it mean to work on yourself?
- It’s stopping waiting for others to change.
That is, any change you want to make to grow as a person depends on you. Dialogue also indicates that we must become aware that we cannot change or control others, their ways of being and thinking.
Work on yourself for personal growth
Working on yourself is a inner work to grow as a personachieve emotional well-being and live with more freedom, confidence and self-esteem.
Inner work is aimed at loving oneself, accepting oneself and achieving the basic balance to enjoy life and have good mental health, without wanting to change or control others.
He personal growth process is slow and gradual. A drastic change is incompatible with emergency solutions. It is a true long-distance race that requires effort and commitment and that can last a lifetime. It can be considered a journey of self-discovery.
A process that basically consists of knowing yourself better to get the best out of yourself, starting with what you want to achieve and where you are, how far you have left to travel.
Step by step in personal growth
- Reflection
The first step would be meditation to learn about our decisions. The practice of mindfulness will help you become aware of the beliefs that dominate you, find answers and know yourself better. This is a step that you must return to again and again to observe and evaluate your growth process. - Your values versus your behaviors
Do you act in accordance with your values? Maybe you haven’t even thought about it. Identify them, since they are the ones that, in principle, guide you when making decisions. If there is a dissonance between your values and your behavior, this will cause you emotional discomfort. Therefore, you must work to detect the reason for this dissonance and be able to correct it. - Identify your strengths and weaknesses
It is useful to make a list of strengths and another of weaknesses. Working on our strengths helps us develop new skills and, by extension, our personal growth. For their part, weaknesses represent obstacles and we must also work on them so that they affect us as little as possible. - What are our habits, how do they influence us?
Finding out what our habits are, how they influence our life and analyzing which of them help us grow is part of our inner work focused on personal growth. If we are constant, we can modify them to get closer to the desired lifestyle. - What does your environment think about your personal development?
Ask your environment, the people close to you, how they perceive your evolution, if they appreciate your changes. This way you will get feedback that will help you reorient the process and you will have valuable external information about the facets that you should continue working on.
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