The Personal Development Cult

 

Personal development is great.  It is a lifelong process of improving yourself in various aspects of your life that includes health, wealth, thinking, relationships, etc.  Personal development is a great tool to help you work on areas and create the life you want.  I have been on this journey for more than a decade now and I have grown in leaps and bounds.  Unfortunately, there is a dark side to personal development that I call The Cult of Personal Development.  It is a sneaky cult and one you do not even realize you are a part of sometimes.  Let me explain.

 

The goal of personal development is to improve.  Let's say I want to be a better listener.  To begin, I go about learning what it takes to be a better listener: Being present when talking to someone; listening to learn and understand and not just waiting to speak; body language; questions; etc.  Awesome!  I now some of the concepts to be a better listener.

 

Here, however, is where the cult of personal development comes in.  Now that I think I know about being a better listener, I am going to move on and learn about being a better.....(choose the topic).  And then I dive in and start learning about that.

 

STOP THE PRESSES!

 

Did I ever apply what I learned about listening and become a more effective listener?  Did I develop a plan to implement what I learned and run personal experiments to actually improve in the area of listening?  Or did I think I developed in the area of listening because I learned some material and now I am ready to move onto the next topic?

 

And that is where things go sideways.

 

We get caught up with learning and miss the important aspect of implementation.  We think that knowledge and learning is personal development and so we listen to the newest podcast, read the newest book, buy the newest online course, etc.  Do not get me wrong.  Learning is GREAT!  I believe in being a lifelong learner.

 

However, if all I do is learn and never actually take time to implement what I learn, did I TRULY learn?

 

Personally, I was caught in the cult of personal development.  I would listen to podcasts while I got ready for work. I would listen to material on the way to work.  I would listen to material on the way home from work.  I was learning, learning, learning.  Then one day I woke up and realized I was so full of learning that I was about ready to vomit.  I tired of learning.  Where was the change?  Where was the growth?  Where was the pausing and taking time to fully learn something by applying it to my life.

 

So, I decided to get off the merry-go-round and leave the cult.

 

Now, I am dedicated to just a few small things.  I want to improve my thinking and my speaking.  I run self experiments to try to improve these areas.  I seek to win these moments, my "Victory in The Moment Principle."  I am being patient with myself.  I am giving myself grace as I learn.  And I am certainly NOT allowing myself to run off to the newest topic or buy the newest book.  Nope.

 

Baby steps.