Personal Growth Demystified

The blog post series demystifying Personal Growth
Links to the other parts:
The Vision
Goals

Bringing order to chaos

There is a lot of talk going around the personal growth topic. A Fast-Changing World requires us to follow these changes. You often hear that we should find a way to invest in ourselves to stay competitive.

Terms like feedback, motivation, time management, habits, goals, vision, KPIs, OKRs and many more are often mentioned.
At interviews some of the most frequent questions are:
- Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
- What are your strengths and weaknesses?
- What are you passionate about?
- What motivates you?

Companies are investing a lot of money into soft skill trainings for employees. Some of them embrace it with open arms, some aren’t just open enough and waste both time and money. Some of them take the content literally or they have no luck with the lecturers, then when they try to apply it, they apply it in a artificial way and often get discouraged. Many of them are closed minded from the start and strongly believe that soft skills are not making any difference and are total bul**hit.

While mastering each of the pieces mentioned above I had a feeling like something is missing, that I am not getting the full picture and by adding patch by patch I am not doing it in the right way.
I missed the big picture, I had to connect the dots and make sense of it all. I wanted to see a picture in front of me where everything fits nicely together.
Like a puzzle, when each piece is in its place, together they magnificently present the horizon.

I am still collecting pieces of my puzzle and enjoying the process. But I found the frame that keeps them together and gives each of them purpose and meaning. Now everything makes sense.

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In this series of blog posts I will transfer this knowledge frame and some of the puzzles to you.

The thing that I am passionate about is Personal Growth and I look forward to our journey together where we’re hopefully going to make some meaningful investments in ourselves. The more we make ourselves better, it’s also better for the people around us. The more we learn, the more we can contribute.

Let’s start with the term “Personal Growth”.

Personal Growth - Definition

Personal growth is a process in which a person evolves and strives to live as effectively and efficiently as possible. Strives to fulfil its full potential.

Efficiency is doing something properly, in the shortest time possible.
Effectiveness is doing the right thing. Doing something that is aligned with our goals.

Let’s say we need to change the lock on our door. Our goal is that all our locks in the apartment work. Efficiency, here, is the time and care that we invested while changing the lock. Effectiveness would mean that we changed the lock on the right door.

Here is how I see Personal Growth:

Personal Growth can be described as the harmony of our vision, lighthouses guiding our way to that vision and our flexibility on that path.

Everything is subordinated to the vision. If we take life for example, vision would be how we want our life to look like. Lighthouses are like checkpoints showing us that we are going in the right direction to fulfil our vision. The path to the vision is often not easy and it usually takes a lot of strength, courage, responsibility and perseverance to get there. That is mirrored in our flexibility on that path.

Conclusion

In our growth, everything revolves around three things:
- Knowing what we want
- Our readiness
- Actions and actual steps to get there

All those soft skill trainings teach us to set a structure, so we can approach things in a safer and proper way and gives us some tools and techniques that can help us on that way.

Before we even start our journey we need to find an answer to a not so easy question, a question that puzzles most of us and that is: What do we want?
When we get an answer to this question our life will get some meaning.

Thanks for staying with me to the end :)
If something doesn’t add up at this point, be patient. At the end every puzzle will have its place. Next time I will write about the first Personal Growth building block and that is the Vision.