Personal Growth

We are all unique, creative, loving human beings. When we are born we begin to smile and coo and people say "oh what a beautiful baby". Then we begin to crawl and the family is enthralled. We begin to take those few steps and of course we fall. "Get up Sweetie, never mind you can try again. Come let me hold your hand. Yes, Yes Yes! "We take those first steps, motivated on all the way.

It's no wonder people walk around with low self images, and insecurity. We believe them and they become so much a part of us. Sometimes we hear them told to others by others and then, when we get something wrong we tell them to ourselves in our minds - "come on Sam you're not clever enough" or "you won’t get it right (so leave it)"

And we start believing our thoughts. It is not that we don’t stop to question them and if they are real. We most often don’t even see them. It's like walking through life blindfolded and also hitting ourselves along the way. 

The average person has around 70,000 thoughts going through their head a day and most of it is unconscious and depending who you are may be quite negative. A way to work on ourselves is to get to know those thoughts and then question if they are really true or not. I recommend reading the article on Mindfulness.

In my experience cognitive awareness and inquiry is one of the key factors in personal growth.  Mastering your mind, your thoughts, and beliefs opens up a whole new space of awareness.  In this space of awareness we evolve and  respond to our life with conscious choice.  

Exercise - Noticing your thoughts 

Here is a classic exercise to practice awareness,  You can do this any time of day and any place. 

Sit down at a table and actively look into your mind for one or two minutes. Don’t do anything else but to look and see where is your mind right now? Are your thoughts of the past, the present or the future? What's there? Are you thinking something which appears to be positive, negative or neutral. After about two minutes start to write down everything you remembered you were thinking about. Then read it neutrally, without passing any judgment or criticism about what you wrote.