Personal development

A so-called comfort zone may be exactly where we belong, because it may be the exact place we are serving our purpose.

It is only an illusion of success that one needs to push themselves every day to reach their potential. We will all die never reaching our full potential, because we will always be more than we know or ever discover.

To imply those that are not pushing themselves everyday are sitting in some sort of comfort zone is absurd. A comfort zone doesn't exist anyway, we are mostly being niggled in some way on the inner to pay attention to what we need for our growth.

The personal growth industry wants you to think if you not constantly looking for ways to stretch yourself, you are not growing. This is not only untrue but is adding to the amount of depression and anxiety we have in society among people.

If we are in a place where we feel we are meant to be, that's good, thus we should not be allowing people to guilt trip us into believing we then must get out of our comfort zone. We don’t need to stretch ourselves for the sake of stretching. Learn to view challenges as the flow of life, as we don’t have to feel challenged to grow when that is our intent as we are just embracing what helps us grow as it flows naturally.

Many go through life feeling like life is just happening and go about their days just letting life happen of its own accord.

They live feeling a victim to life paying attention to the external things going on around them because they don’t believe they have any control over how their life turns out so just leave it to chance. A person who wants to grow will want to take charge of their own life. This is a move out of unconscious living, but can also present issues with control where one tries to control others in the attempt to change their own lives. This can bring up a lot of fears and insecurity about life as one realizes they can’t change things they don’t like that are for their growth.

To live as yourself means to be real and not playing roles or personas. People see life as they are rather than how it is. Self-awareness will teach us that we are reacting to our life instead of listening and opening to what is within us. We then come to the realisation the source of our suffering comes from the stories we have told ourselves about our life not the experiences we’ve been through.

Personal growth is about ourselves and our relationship with ourself. It’s about discovering who we already are and letting go of false perceptions and preconceptions of what that is. It’s about forgetting the stories we have been telling ourselves and focus on now. Most people don’t trust life because life can break our hearts, bring hard challenges, illness, grief, hardship, death and more than we can handle sometimes.

Life is speaking to you every day if you listen. This teaches you that you can trust life because even though you don’t always like what it delivers you know life knows its path. It not possible to take advantage of what life offers if we don’t open to what it has to offer. Perception is everything and when we are clouded by our stories it’s not possible to see the horizon.

This is another perspective on goal setting and is how I work with continual progress. Society has become obsessed with goal setting. Setting goals do not keep a person motivated over the long term.

I believe goals can push you forward in the short term but in the long run having a system in place, meaning what we practice daily to keep progressing will make the real difference. If we continually measure our success or happiness by goal setting, we are constantly telling ourselves we are not good enough until we reach a goal. The problem with mind setting is it teaches people to put off being happy or successful until they have reached their next milestone, and so the cycle begins again.

Long term goal setting puts unnecessary stress on a person. Why not focus on practice rather than performance? This keeps us in the present moment which keeps us real, and we make progress at the same time. What if we looked at goal setting from another perspective. Most people consider, given what they have been told, that setting goals is plain common sense. How is it possible to set goals that are realistic when we don’t have control over outside influences that could interfere with long term goals?

What if I said long-term goal setting is limiting! For example, a person is trying to lose weight, so sets themselves a goal of how much weight to lose by a certain date, instead of being focused on the present by eating better for their health. When a person sets themselves a goal weight in the long term this sets them up for falling off track because they know they have months to go, so they can justify a slip here and there. Well, that’s what they tell themselves.

I believe it is better to make a commitment to improvement everyday rather than defining limitations through long term goals. I believe people will make progress beyond what their goals would be this way as there is no limitations defining where they want to be.