The secret behind personal growth is that there really is no secret. It is possible for you to change, grow and learn. To become the person you want to be, to do what you want to do, to have what you want to have. It is all about paying attention to some simple steps.

Below are just a few of the top ways to accelerate your personal growth and achieve what you want a whole lot sooner.

1. Spend time to really think what you want, allow yourself the time to dream of your ideal life. This involves investing a bit of time to truly explore what you truly want and what your ideal life is like. If you don’t have a destination of what you want, how can you possible ever get there. It’s like going for a drive in the car and having no idea where you are going, you will never get there will you? Be specific and know what you want is the first step.
2. Have a notebook or journal close by. Jot down your thoughts, ideas, plans and dreams. This helps in two ways, firstly you can record these things and have it for future contemplation and secondly, you can see pretty clearly if you are progressing at all toward you goals.
3. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes, this is where you learn and grow. Mistakes happen and depending on how you react or deal with the mistake is whether you grow or dissolve.  Remember that a person who never makes mistakes, never learns anything and rarely ever does anything either. Embrace mistakes as they grow us faster than anything.
4. Admit you don’t know everything, in other words, stay humble and teachable. You find a lot of people who are unteachable and act as if they know everything. When people tell you things refuse to say, “I know that.” This simple sentence stops you growing and also stops people even bothering to tell you things as they know you will only say that you know about that. Admit that you don’t know everything and you will be surprised at all the new things you will learn.
5. Learn to increase self confidence by making contacts and interacting with others. The more you think about others and take your focus off yourself, you will gain self confidence in bumper doses. Having self-confidence is an important step to increasing personal growth. Having self-confidence will help you with opportunities that would otherwise slip by you.
6. Make honesty your motto and that means being honest with yourself first. Also, be true to yourself and evaluate whether your dreams are actually your dreams and goals. They may belong to  someone else, like someone close to you or your family may have influenced you into thinking that it is your goal, when it is really theirs.  Honesty is indeed the best policy when it comes to personal growth.
7. It has been said that the only things in life that will help you to grow are the people you meet and the books you read. Start to read good books, books on success, hobbies, health and business skills. You can start by subscribing to a good personal growth website and have regular newsletter articles sent to your email inbox regularly.  Just a little bit each day is more than enough as you will start to notice that you are thinking differently and you will get different results.
8. Balance your life with family and friends. It is easy to invest so much time into improving yourself and your skills that you often tend to put your special friends and family in the far background. Make sure you spend time with them and balance your life. Often the lessons that we learn from family and friends are a growth in themselves.
9. Always remain teachable. Everyone can teach you things. People come into our lives for a couple of reasons, maybe it is that we can learn from them or that they can learn from us.

A quote often quoted states that : “To get different results we need to do something different. And this starts with our thoughts, then our actions, then we get different results. It is pure insanity to expect different results and still do the same thing. If we do the same thing we get the same results.

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The most fascinating theme in any movie is the transformation of the main character, who evolves from a lower state of awareness to a higher one. Although this theme is repeated with minor variations in one movie after another, people do not tire of it because it represents their own story.

The meaning of life may itself be entirely about personal growth. Enlightenment is the final vision, where you see everything in a whole new light, with the universe and your neighbors as part of a massive conspiracy of beauty, elegance, love, and wisdom.

• Personal growth happens by default.
• Life itself forces it to happen.
• The more stimulating the environment, the more it challenges you to accelerate your personal growth.
• Personal growth can be defined as the evolution of awareness, a journey from a narrow, dysfunction perspective to a broader, functional one. It is an expansion of perception.

The reason why it can be thought of as an evolutionary force is because it is the result of adaptation to a stressor. All problems are due to an error in perception; a challenge is posed by the environment for you to adapt or suffer the consequences of failure.

For example, a poor state of health is due to a physical challenge, a rocky relationship is due to an interaction challenge, and a scarcity of finances is due to an economic challenge.

The reason it is a challenge is because it threatens your sense of well-being, and failure to
respond in a more adaptive way is to experience the collapse of what you need.

In a nutshell, personal growth happens when your inner map of how the world works is incorrect. You discover that your perception is inaccurate because your experience is misaligned with your desire.

What is needed is more information, an upgrade of your inner map. New streets need to be drawn in, new paths need to be discovered.

Every problem is an evolutionary taunt.

For example, if you are being financially challenged, what is needed is a new model on how to earn more and manage your money better. A bill that you do not have the means to pay is a financial challenge.

Adaptation occurs when new information is learned. This information changes the structure of the challenge. The result of your mental upgrade about what works now becomes your new model. Using the money example, new information may come in the form of learning how to make more money. This information is then available for you to respond to the world in a more functional way.

Life is constantly posing challenges like this and we are constantly learning how to adapt to these pressures. Each successfully resolved challenge is soon followed by another challenge at the next level. Each unsuccessfully resolved challenge results in your staying at your current level. It’s called “feeling stuck” or “in a rut.”

This is the process of personal growth.

The growth proceeds along two trajectories: vertical and horizontal.

Vertical growth is learning something new and the new knowledge then fashions a new reality. Our college years, with its academic challenges, is probably the time of the most accelerated personal growth. Similarly, starting a new business or raising a new family are all vertical growth experiences.

Horizontal growth is integrating this new information. You are adjusting to the changes stimulated by vertical growth.

Furthermore, this growth also advances on three levels: ego-centric, ethno-centric, and world-centric. Each is a developmental stage.

In the ego-centric stage, your focus is on improving your own personal experience. In the ethno-centric stage, your focus is on improving your group. This could be an ethnic group, a religious group, or a national group; in other words, any particular tribe that makes you feel that you are one of its members. In the world-centric stage, your focus is on improving things for everyone.

Each stage is not necessarily clearly delineated. The higher stage may incorporate some features of the lower stage. In addition, each stage is broken up into further developmental stages.

The more challenges you overcome, the more you evolve to inhabit a higher stage. In addition, each stage has sub-stages which have to be transcended.

Factoring in the idea of incarnation, most people may spend their whole life in only one sub-stage or may move through several sub-stages but not leave their main stage. Other people may evolve from one stage to another. A few, rare individuals move through all the stages. Those who hit the final sub-stage of the final stage are considered enlightened and do not need to stay on the karmic wheel.

• These growth stages also apply to cultures and civilizations.
• While growth happens by default; it can also be engineered, or artificially stimulated.
• This process is called learning.
• Throughout history, those who choose to be self-evolving, do it using two specific methods.

One is using the imaginistic aspect of mind and the other is through the linguistic aspect of mind. One can, of course, use both aspects of mind. Usually, however, most people have a predominant and favorite method. It is similar to how most people make one hand more dominant than the other, while only a few are ambidextrous.

Using the imaginistic method, or visual thinking, remarkable progress can be made.

Those with a scientific bent appear to favor this method. Kekule dropped off to sleep by a fireplace, had a dream about a snake swallowing its own tail, and developed the basis of all organic chemistry, the benzene ring. Einstein precipitated the biggest leap in Science since Newton by day dreaming about a train ride on a beam of light.

In terms of the Jungian model of the mind: this would incorporate intellect, intuition, feeling, and sensation. For example, Kekule had a dream, which includes intuition, emotion and a tactile sense. Upon awakening, he then used intellect to define the benzene ring.

This method of visual thinking is as powerful as the transition between Roman numerals and Arabic numerals. Using Roman numerals, for example, the mathematics needed to create String theory in Physics would have been impossible. Since, to date, String theory is neither empirical nor observable, it could not exist without mathematics. Considering that this may very well end up being a complete theory of everything, you will appreciate the value of the use of Arabic numerals.

Another method is the Socratic Method, which is about 2,300 years old.

The Socratic method is essentially asking and answering questions. Questions probe consciousness and stimulate a search for answers.

This method is not to be confused with the didactic teaching that is referred to as modern education.

The Socratic method was used during the era of Classical Greece and the Renaissance, two epochs that produced more highly intelligent people than has ever been known.

The reason these two methods are so powerful is because they disrupt “neuronal habituation” the phenomenon that with a constant signal, nerves and brain fall sleep.
Changing the stimulation causes the brain to start working in a new and unusual way.

Ironically, our current educational methods across the globe stimulate only a limited amount of personal growth because they result in the stabilization of signals, creating
neuronal habitation. Subjectively, people claim to fall asleep or drift into a day dream during a class session. They miss the lesson because the repeated signal created boredom and disassociation. It did not provoke them to move beyond passivity.

With these two methods, learning becomes interactive and stimulating, resulting in a quantum leap in personal growth.

You don’t have to wait for all the right conditions before you can experience vertical growth; you can invite it to happen through choosing immersion in new, stimulating, life-affirming information.

Saleem Rana

http://www.articlesbase.com/self-help-articles/techniques-for-accelerating-personal-growth-86683.html

Download several free ebooks on personal growth here

What’s the deal with all this personal growth and self development business? Why bother in the first place? Charles Atlas who earned himself the title as the ‘the world’s most perfectly developed man’ had this to say: ‘Truest SUCCESS is but the development of self.‘

It’s so easy to treat personal development as ‘optional’ and so few people ever take the time to actively improve themselves. Your personal growth and self development is arguably one of the most important thing you can do with your time. You can even argue that to actualize your true potential is the purpose of being here. In many ways all your actions are geared towards ‘self improvement‘. Everything you do, you do with a positive intent. This, however is mostly unconscious and for the majority of people it’s a case of pursuing ‘things’ and ‘stuff’ with the (all to common) assumption that when they get enough stuff they will be happy.

You don’t have to search too far to find just how wrong this theory really is. Every day we read about ‘extremely successful’ people who end up in rehab or who kill themselves. Why? To return to Charles Atlas – true success is but the development of your ‘self’. At no point in your life can you just stop and say ‘now I am successful – I think I’ll take the next 10 years off’. Unfortunately this is ‘the dream’ that so many people aspire to.

The key to a lifetime of happiness lies in personal growth. Real and lasting fulfillment in life comes from consistently improving the quality of your life. Life is dynamic and it has to keep moving. Like in nature, everything that does not grow, dies! You will either grow or die, and although you probably won’t die a physical death, you most certainly will suffer a psychological death. Depression is but one example of the effects of failing to grow as a person. If you are not growing you will feel like you are dying.

Every day life hands us opportunities to grow. They are mostly disguised as problems and unfortunately most people curse them instead of seeing the wonderful opportunities that they present. Earl Schoff once said ‘Don’t wish for less problems. Wish that you were better’. This is where personal growth comes to play and you must do it on purpose and with an active state of mind.

So why do people fail to actively participate in their own personal growth? Well, there are certain personal growth barriers that prevent them from actively progressing in any area of your life. The key word being ‘actively’. The three biggest personal growth barriers are three interrelated behaviours that tend to keep us immobilized and locked up in inaction. The result being the failure to progress with our lives.

Personal Growth Barrier #1: Procrastination

Procrastination is the irrational delay of tasks, especially important ones. On a conscious level you might want a specific result and you know what course of action to take, but still you remain immobilized. The failure to act is what keeps you where you are. It is likely that what you are procrastinating about is what you MUST do as this will help you grow in your ability to take action and just do it. Keep in mind that you only procrastinate about tasks that you value and at some level you know you will benefit from it.

Personal Growth Barrier #2: Indecision

Every single action is preceded by a decision. The ancestor to every action is a decision and the failure to act can be traced back to the failure to make decisions. The ironic thing is that not making a decision is a decision – isn’t it? Indecision is like a disease that you have to eradicate from your life. Indecision is simply the result of a fear of failure and by not making a decision you can’t fail – right? Realize that nothing in the future has happened yet and fearing the worse possible outcome will almost certainly keep you from making the decision. If you don’t make the decisions you won’t take the actions and you will remain immobilized.

Personal Growth Barrier #3: Comfort Zones

Comfort zones are all those things that you are too familiar with – and often to the point where you don’t even attempt anything else. Inside your comfort zones everything is known and you have this sense of certainty that you can comfortably deal with anything that comes your way. You’ve done it before and you feel ‘at ease’ with it. Stepping outside your comfort zones challenge your beliefs and it challenges your perceptions. Stepping outside your comfort zones however, challenges you to grow as a person – you have to grow to get comfortable outside your old comfort zone. Most of your limitations are self imposed and controlled by what you belief you can or cannot do, what you like or dislike, what you think is right or wrong. You have to keep stretching your ‘self’ physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually to avoid standing still and remaining imprisoned by your comfort zones. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said ‘Man’s mind, once stretched to new idea never goes back to it’s original dimensions.’

All barriers are only that – they are barriers. It often strikes me how these typical vehicle barriers at boarder check points are so ‘flimsy’. They can hardly stop a bicycle, yet they stop big sixteen wheelers. The barrier is more psychological than actual. So are the barriers to your personal growth. They can stop you, but they can’t keep you unless you allow them to. Simply acknowledge them and then move on. Personal growth is a choice and it’s an active process. To ensure a happy and fulfilled life that is filled with joy and appreciation you have to consistently grow and expand your ‘self’.

Deon Du Plessis

http://www.articlesbase.com/self-help-articles/the-3-most-prominent-personal-growth-barriers-108913.html

Download several free ebooks on personal growth here