Is growth making you feel miserable...?

The Misconception Around Personal Growth

Personal growth is weird in a way…

And it’s hard to objectively measure.

That’s where most people go wrong:

There is a common belief among many people that personal development means that you’re going to feel happier, more fulfilled, less anxious, and overall the idea is that growth leads to a more positive emotional state!

This is simply not true!

Most of the time, you’ll feel worse than before, initially at least.

Here’s why:

Personal growth means that you’ll have to learn and do new things, which by definition are uncomfortable to do. Growing means failing a lot, which creates frustration. You’ll have to face your own shortcomings, which can be terrifying.

Emotionally, it’s gonna get worse before it gets better.

If you can accept this as fact, you’ve got a much better chance at actually changing your own behavior, habits, mindset and (as a result) your results in life!

I’m Surprised I Even Know This…

You can think of it like this:

I’m not sure where I learnt this, but for many trees and plants, you’ve got to prune them regularly. You’re literally cutting off parts of the plant/tree, which then gives them more room to grow.

And as a result, they grow stronger and bigger.

The same goes for you as a person:

There are multiple ways in which you can “prune” yourself to get ahead in life. And in this newsletter, we’ll explore a couple of ways in which to do this.

Working to Learn Rather Than Earn

More money isn’t always better.

Sometimes, personal growth can mean taking a step back financially to gain other benefits in your life. This could be done for various reasons:

• Take a job doing something you love rather than hate even when that means earning less

• Move to a different area, state or country, resulting in having to take on another job elsewhere

• Perhaps you’re starting to work 4 days rather than 5 so that you can work on other projects with the extra time

• Perhaps you look for a job that pays less, but gives you more time with family or any other important reason for taking the pay cut

But here’s perhaps the most important one:

Work to Learn Rather Than to Earn!

This is especially important for younger people, because knowledge compounds.

The idea here is simple:

Say you’re at the crossroads and you could take a job that earns more or one that pays less but helps you learn valuable skills. Oftentimes, it’s better to take the opportunity where you can learn valuable skills.

It’s a short-term versus long-term decision.

You sacrifice now in order to get something better later on.

Delayed gratification is one of the most important life skills you could learn!

Don’t let short-term accolades keep you from long-term success!

Overcoming Limiting Beliefs

We ALL carry around baggage from our past.

Even if you’re not aware of it!

Let me give you an example:

For all of my teenage years as well as about half of my twenties, I was terrified of talking to any girl that I had an interest in or crush on. I would freeze up and I was never able to make the move.

But…

I never knew why I had this mental block until I was around 24 - 25.

Turns out, I had childhood trauma around it!

Here’s what I figured out:

Back when I was roughly 4 or 5 years old… Yes, let that sink in! When I was that young, I had a crush on a girl in my class… and people found out about it.

Of course, I got teased and laughed at.

“Hahahahahaha, Maikel likes this girl! Nenenenene.”

But here’s the crucial part:

As adults, we can see this was just normal kid behavior, no malicious intent.

However, this led to me developing the belief that “If I express interest, I will get mocked and ridiculed. I won’t be part of the group.” 

I had that belief for roughly 20 years of my life!

And I never knew it until a LOT of introspection and meditation.

So, let me ask you:

What hidden beliefs could be holding you back?

Right now, your subconscious is repressing a lot of memories.

One of the reasons why personal development is so uncomfortable is that you have to bring those repressed memories to the surface in order to resolve the negativity around them.

That’s why growth is usually painful!

If you’re optimizing your life around “feeling happy”, you’ll stay stuck!

Note:

If you’re up for making real progress with your mindset and beliefs, the action steps below will give you a few ways to start working on uncovering your limiting beliefs.

Learning to Love the Journey

This is the 3rd area where personal growth feels awful.

Put simply:

Meaning that if you’re aiming for a new goal, you have to learn new skills. You have to improve your existing skills. You have to put in a ton of effort and meet with failure along the way. Then you’ve got to learn the lessons from that failure, try again, make new mistakes and repeat until you achieve your goal.

You’re in for a rough journey!

Along the way you will:

• Feel like you’re incompetent because you suck at the new things

• Become frustrated when you try and fail for the 18th time

• Have to sound like an idiot when asking for advice on something that you think is “beginner-level level”

• You’ll have to face one of the biggest fears among people: the fear of the unknown

• You’ll be scared of failing. You’re living in uncertainty because you’ve never done it before and you’re afraid you never will.

• And many more negative thoughts….

For those reasons, most people choose to stay stuck!

Why?

Even though you might not like where you’re at in life, your mind (subconscious to put it simply) hates the unknown even more. It will rather stay stuck in a familiar but unpleasant situation than to traverse into unknown territory.

The way out is simply this:

You’ve got to force yourself out of your comfort zone!

Then, you reinforce the fact that you’re still perfectly fine, even if you failed miserably. You’ve got to prove your fears wrong because your mind will assume the worst-case scenario.

By proving your fears wrong, you reduce the fear of taking action.

You’ve got to start loving the journey.

By which I mean to change your perspective on failure. To most people this has an extremely negative meaning. People HATE to fail with a passion! However, in order to achieve your goals, you’ve got to love failing and do it more often!

A master has failed way more often than the intermediate have even tried!

Double your rate of failure and you double your rate of success!

Sidenote:

This does not mean that you screw things up on purpose or that you actively try to fail (don’t be a dumfuq)! It means you try your best, you inevitably fail at some point, you learn from your mistake and you fail at something else later.

Repeat that process until you achieve your goal!

Audio Lesson: Breaking Bad Habits Easily

What if I told you there was an easy way to change your habits?

A lot of the content you see around habits is making it more complicated than it needs to be. If you simply focus on this 1 simple thing you’re 80% of the way there in terms of changing your habits!

Do More in Less Time

Regardless of what you decide to do, you’re going to need excellent time management skills to speed up your path to success!

Specifically, you need to understand the 4 kinds of time.

In this video, I cover these 4 different types of time and how to optimize each of them. You’ll learn how to best use your hours to achieve more, once you spend a few minutes to click that play button below! 😉 

Finding Your Hidden Beliefs

There are multiple ways to uncover your limiting beliefs.

What I would prompt you to do is using shadow questions.

These are questions designed to put your attention and focus on your feelings and emotions so that you can learn more about yourself. The great part about your mind is that it responds to any question you ask it.

You can guide yourself with the right questions!

Try asking yourself some of these questions:

• Why am I not good enough to achieve [insert goal]?

• What is holding me back right now?

• What side of me am I afraid that other people will see?

• What’s one thing that, if I had it, would completely change my life?

• If I had complete confidence, what would I do differently?

You want to be in a quiet environment when doing this. Make sure you’re not bothered by other people and eliminate all distractions. Don’t bring your phone, don’t play any music, nothing to fidget with.

It should be just you and your mind.

Note:

You’ll often get two responses with these kinds of questions.

What you will likely get is one answer from the part of your mind we call the ego. You might ask “Why am I not good enough?” and this part answers “What do you mean?! OF COURSE I’m good enough!”.

But you’ll also get that other part of you to respond. That voice inside of you that is insecure or the voice that talks down on you. And this voice will give you an honest answer of how part of you really feels.

For this exercise, we’re looking for the second voice to identify beliefs.