No Quick Fixes To Personal Development

A lot of what you will read in books, listen to on audio programmes, attend at seminars, and learn about from other people in the "self-help" industry is postulated on the fact that most people are seeking the quick fix. It is frustrating to watch self-professed, self-help experts peddling parlour tricks to a hopeful yet naive public looking for a way out of their predicament but instead the expectant populace are kept as victims by the very charlatans, quacks and swindlers professing to help them.

Look, I won’t lie to you; I am definitely seeking the shortest, most optimal path to success in whatever endeavour I undertake but you have to understand there are no instant pour, one hour to set, ready mix solutions to personal growth. There are no shortcuts you can take to experience true, lasting personal change in all aspects of our life.

I strive, with every article I pen and with every personal development talk I give to distance myself as much as possible from the traditional "self-help" industry where most of what is being marketed and sold is 21st century snake oil by a travelling salesman who has a name that begins with "Doc.”

Personal development – lasting, personal and positive growth – takes a lot of dedication and persistence and skill. The skills needed cannot be acquired in a few minutes. It takes a considerable effort to practice them and apply the lessons you learn every day. By practicing daily, by applying tools and techniques that can be learnt through simple, persistent study, personal development will come to you.

Personal development pays off over time. Personal development pays off in the future. Personal development pays huge dividends today for the work you did yesterday.

If you work for a company to earn a living you understand this inherently. You work for two weeks or four weeks, and then you get paid for that work, after it is done. You are paid now for work performed in the past.

Personal development is the same way.

The work you did last month pays off today. The work you do today pays off next month. Unlike working for a salary, where you only get paid once for the work that you have performed in the past, personal development pays off continuously. The work that you put in to your personal growth last month pays off today, but it also pays off tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. And the effort you expend today will still be paying off years and decades from now. And every time you put in time to your personal development it doesn’t just pay off once. It pays off on top of what is already paying off. Your personal development of today is compounding with your personal development from yesterday to pay off an even larger dividend tomorrow. Personal development pays off every single day for the rest of your life.

Seeking the quick fix, the short cut, the get rich quick scheme will always inevitably lead to failure on the part of the person seeking it. There are no short cuts to long lasting personal development. There are no quick fixes to the ills of our psyche. And let me assure you that there are no get rich quick schemes that you can partake in where someone else isn’t getting richer than you, at your expense, because they realised that they are selling you a get rich quick scheme but they are doing it over a long period of time. The people selling you on getting rich quick got rich slowly at your expense.

Determining your course and making a conscious choice of what you want is made by identifying our desires as clearly and as precisely as you can. Note that I didn’t say you must identify them precisely, only as precisely as you can. Our wants, our desires, our dreams, our needs, they can change on a day by day basis. What you desire today isn’t what you desired last year. Events in our lives outside of our control have a way of changing our plans and our aims. To determine your desires you must give yourself over to self-examination and introspection. Once you have identified what you think you want, you need to examine your supporting behaviours, what you do on a daily basis to make your desires come to fruition, and determine if your activities are congruent with your life. This self-examination can be painful. When you look closer you might not like what you see, when you ask questions you might not like the answers you receive but by examining your desires you can create goals that are in line with your life and your lifestyle, or better yet slowly bring your life in line with your new found goals to allow you to reach them easier.

It can be agonizing to reflect on past deeds and misdeeds and all that they entail. Who wants to feel the guilt and shame of knowing we did the wrong thing? Who wants to feel the anguish of learning about our shortcomings? The pain of examining your life can be a great dissuader but I believe the primary reason that many people do not question their own lives is that they do not know what to ask, they are not given to looking closely because they do not know what to look for.

Your inherent programming, both nurture and nature is sabotaging your life and the lives of those around you. If you take the time to change your programming you can ultimately change your life for the better. Most of the population isn’t even aware of their programming, they are not even aware they have been programmed, even when they do wake up and start to question their life and examine their programming, they might not be aware of all of it.

The major problem with quick fix solutions is that they are terribly seductive. They sucker you by appearing alluring and tempting with their “10 minute” psychobabble designed to appeal to your base fantasies. Having a quick fix foisted upon us by someone or seeking out a quick fix is your childhood daydreams coming back to you, “You can have it now! With no down payments!”

If you ever read comic books as a child (and I had stacks of them) then you’ve already experienced this with the gaudy coloured advertisements selling cheap and shoddily constructed children’s toys, plans to build your own submarine, stamp collecting goodie bags, or how you can make sizable amounts of cash selling newspapers or greeting cards nobody really wants.

One of the predominant quick fix methods that many have succumbed to in the past few years is visualization. Now don’t get me wrong, visualization is an amazingly powerful tool. I use visualization on a daily basis to achieve what I want. I envision myself cranking out hundreds of lines of code in a few hours, I project how I am going to run the developer meeting, I visually meditate on writing thousands of words and finishing up a new article before going to bed.

So yes, visualization is a hugely useful technique in your toolbox. But visualization is just one tool in a toolbox of many. Pure visualization is also a mid-level skill that shouldn’t really be attempted, or is even necessary for people just starting out on their personal development. Visualization unfortunately has been sold by modern snake oil salesmen as the only tool you need.

Undirected visualization, which is what is often promulgated in popular fantasy fiction such as “The Secret” without the substance of directed goals and proper life management principles to back it up is no better than daydreaming, the only thing that undirected visualization is good for, apparently, is selling a lot of books stuffed with populist nonsense. Visualization is utterly useless without the foundation skills it needs to build on.

Visualization must be followed by determination.

Determination of what is urgent.

Determination of what is important.

Determination of how to proceed.

Determination of what to do next.

Determination of the best path to follow.

Determination must be followed by action.

If determination is the plan then action is the execution. Without action the plan is never executed and nothing happens. It is as though we never did anything at all. This is a step where many people fall down or become so lost in the “what” that they never go beyond the planning in to the “do.”

A plan does not need to be elaborate, nor does it need to be detailed. A detailed plan helps, especially when building skyscrapers, but for most aspects of a person’s life that involves only a single individual and slight improvements in their lifestyle, education or income, simple statements on a small index card equivalent to back of the envelope plans are sufficient.

I believe the reason that many people don’t move beyond the plan phase in to the action phase is because they don’t know how. Occasionally the plan is bad, but you can’t take that next step, from “plan” to “do”, if you don’t know how because you have never been taught.

Action must be followed by persistence. It is one thing to perform an action, it is quite another to perform multiple actions repeatedly. Once the plan is in effect and we are moving forward, persistence will move our campaign forward until we reach our goals. Lack of persistence are why 90% of blogs are never updated, why diet plans are not followed, why exercise regimes are not stuck to and why people remain poor.

True lasting change comes from deep within over an extended period. A get rich quick scheme will not help us to build lasting wealth just like a 10 day fad diet won’t allow us to lose weight and more importantly keep it off. The total amount of time we apply to execution of our plan does not need to be decades or even years. The amount of time each day does not need to be egregious or onerous to our lives. But… change does not occur overnight and it won’t happen in a day or two. You don’t get to see real lasting change just by attending a one day seminar or three day conference.

A little persistence, a little action, a small plan, a little visualization each day can transform our lives very quickly.