Why are you so Addicted to Personal Development?

[Joseph Maynor]

What is it about your life that is so difficult that you need to do all this personal development to overcome it?  There must be something driving your motivation to pursue this path.

[snowleopard]

I wonder if perhaps personal deconstruction, and/or demolition, is sometimes needed, and then start from ground zero, rather than trying to prop up and 'develop' some makeshift fixer-upper -- i.e. a segregated self-identity.

Edited January 6, 2018 by snowleopard

[YaNanNallari]

I couldn't stand a normal life. Doing things for bad purposes.

[star ark]

Food sensitivities were messing me up but I didn't realize this was the case. I tried dietary, meditative, sleep and exercise changes and now I am seeing amazing results. I don't even know what changes did what as I made so many changes overnight, but mindfulness and diet are probably my most effective changes. Mindfulness beats meditation for me.

[Joseph Maynor]

I think the major driver of being addicted to Personal Development is not wanting to accept parts of yourself — rejecting parts of yourself.  But those parts of yourself never die — they’re still there, miserable and aching to be loved and accepted.  This is what creates the intrinsic motivation for self-improvement.

It takes a strong person to have the balls to honor the authentic self in childhood and adolescence.  There are so many forces that make forging a persona attractive.  But that leads to you not loving parts of yourself.  But those parts of yourself never die, they just lie misearable underground.  And this partial self-loathing makes you unconsciously seek reconciliation.  It’s like an internal backfiring mechanism.

This also explains why chasing happens.  Chasing happens when you are still unwilling to accept those parts of yourself, but you are driven to extinguish the suffering caused by not doing so — you keep beating around the bush instead of accepting the bush.  And then after a long time of doing this, you realize you’re still miserable.

This is why shadow-work is so important.  You gotta find out very clearly what parts of yourself and reality you don’t want to accept.  Once you determine that very definitively, then you’ll have the ah-ha moment that can cause you to start to work on accepting reality instead of trying to erase bits of reality from view.  This is where chasing ends.

Once the Mind knows very definitively the cause of this suffering, it won’t stand for it, and that’s where you’ll get your release.  But the Mind is very forgetful, so you need to develop a routine of reminding the Mind.  That’s where your theory and knowledge can be put to work.

Edited January 8, 2018 by Joseph Maynor

[phoenix666]

at the beginning it was mostly suffering.. the insight that I was in fact suffering and the desire to escape the hamster wheel of wants. (which is itself paradoxical ) once you get a taste, you develop a genuine curiosity and love for the beauty of paradoxes negative, external motivation becomes intrinsic one <3 at least, that's what I see in me

[exhale]

What brought me towards personal development? 

I was going through a stressful time in my life, where my wife, daughter and I were packing up our life, selling our house and moving to a different country for me to pursue residency training.  Amidst the chaos, I noticed my reactivity becoming a harmful force in my life.  I could feel my ability to control my emotions slipping.  Any minor challenge was magnified and I was catastrophizing everything.  

I am not sure how, but I stumbled across actualized.org and listened to "how to control your emotions" and it opened my eyes to the concept of personal development and I have been a devoted student since.  I quickly recognized the tremendous value in having a stable disposition in business and life, and that it is a key component of being a leader and role model for anyone watching--particularly my children.

Is the major driver of being addicted to personal development not wanting to accept parts of yourself?

Something that (I believe) I have always been conscious of, is that my goals, my personal development, my passion, my life purpose comes from a place of love.  Before I started exploring personal development, I recognized that a characteristic of the human mind is to categorize and separate.  By this mechanism, the mind works in a binary fashion: good or bad, love or hate, right or wrong, etc.  Therefore, when one identifies something they want to improve in themselves--a flaw, it naturally wants to condemn this trait.  The ego uses this condemnation as the catalyst for self-improvement.  

But, is it possible to love yourself--love that quality of yourself and simultaneous strive to improve it?  I believe so, and that is consistent with my experience. 

[jse]

On 1/7/2018 at 0:45 AM, Joseph Maynor said:

Why are you so Addicted to Personal Development?

    For the same reason we are addicted to self.

[phoenix666]

3 hours ago, exhale said:

 I am not sure how, but I stumbled across actualized.org and listened to "how to control your emotions" and it opened my eyes to the concept of personal development and I have been a devoted student since.

aww, my first Leo video as well. 

how much things changed.. how much I changed.. and you can notice a huge development in Leo as well, I love it that we can see his consciousness expanding!

[Nahm]

I don’t see improving one’s life as an addiction, though PD could be for someone. I think we help ourselves with our own suffering vs looking to other contemporary methods, we start seeing we are ‘unblocking’ what we ourselves ‘blocked’ and at some point it feels pretty damn good. But then we want to know the whole truth, where that good vibe is really coming from. Before you know it, you’re in a rabbit hole of better and better. 

[RawJudah]

Isn’t this just addiction to information and the internet?

People used to do personal development work without all this and they probably got to their end goal faster and more efficiently.

Stop overthinking it and do the work you need to do on yourself.

like Leo has said, this takes years of work, not some quick fix.