Do you Make These Common
Personal Development Mistakes?

Do you make any of these eight personal development mistakes:

1. Thinking you need massive willpower to accomplish your goals. Some willpower is necessary with minor goals but if you are doing what you want to do and are inspired to do, willpower is not needed. You are just doing what you want. The motivation to do things is massive because you are doing what you want to do. If you need willpower then you are doing something that is not truly what you want to do. The trick is to find what you want to do.

2. Using negative reinforcement. Trying to motivate yourself by being negative only serves to make you angry at your prior choices and what you find irritating. It is better to recognize what frustrates you and work on it from a position of wanting the opposite. Instead of saying I am out of shape, say I am going to the gym once a week for an intense weight training session, I am going to do sprints twice a month and I am going for a 30 minute walk 20 times a month.

3. Berating yourself. This goes beyond negative. This is just hateful talk to yourself. I think this is totally unhealthy. Other people pick up on how you feel about yourself and will tend to treat you poorly as well if you are down on yourself. I always hate to see a football player hit himself in the helmet after making a big mistake. We all make mistakes, berating yourself after a mistake does not help, it tends to make you make that mistake again. You have to think extremely highly of yourself.

4. Being impatient with the process. Anything of value takes time. changing your mind on how you want to be only takes an instant, but the effects of that decision will unfold over time. If you make a decision to be a successful businesman after decades of being an employee, you would not expect to have success in that instant. The success will come about over a number of years. You can say I no longer want to be fat and become thin. But the actual thinness will take time to come about.

5. Lack of gratitude. You are alive and reading this on a computer. You are not starving to death. You were not born into slavery. You have options and choices. There are countless things to be grateful for. Just because not everything is as you want it does not mean that it will eventually be that way. You feel better and are happier when you silently express gratitude.

6. Unwilling to make changes or afraid to make changes. If your life is not satisfactory to you, then change, and possibly massive change will be in order. Things will change whether you want them to or not. The best thing to do is embrace change and actively make the changes in your life that make sense to you.

7. Looking to others or looking outside yourself for answers of what you want. Finding out what you want is internal work, not external. You cannot ask someone else what would be good to do, you have to ask yourself. This can be hard if you are not used to it. Most people seem to want others to decide what they should do and other people are happy to boss people around.

8. Feeling guilty about focusing on your needs and desires. You deserve to have a great life just as much as anyone else. Your desires are important. You matter just as much as anyone else. Your life is just as important as anyone else. You do not have to make sure everyone else gets their needs met before you get yours met. Can you understand that? Can you see how important it is to work on what you want? You are not here to be a cog in the system. You are not here to be ordered around. You are not here to lead a small life of desperation.

Sometimes I think the feeling of guilt might be the worst of the personal development mistakes because guilt will paralyze any action you might take.

You do not have to continue to make personal development mistakes. Once you recognize what you are doing you can consciously change your mind on any of these mistakes.

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