Are you looking for tips on how to develop your talents and become a better person? Are you thinking “I really need to do something about my lethargy” or “I have to get rid of my negative emotions” or “why am I always so angry?”. Is that what made you type in ‘Personal Development Seattle’ into Google Search? Well, as you can see you have come to the right place. I named this website Personal Development Seattle just so that people like you can find it easily!
A few years ago, when anger took control of my emotions, I found myself saying things that inadvertently hurt the people I loved and cared about. I wondered if there was some way of learning to stop and think before I speak when I am angry. Anger was my vice. I wouldn’t know what were the triggers but when I got angry, I would just blow! I did not know what I said or did in those few moments of fury.
I figured out that however justified I was in getting angry about some situation, I still had no right to yell and scream, and go on and on in a rant that just wouldn’t stop! I also found that once I blew my top and calmed down in a little while, I quite forgot about what made me angry in the first place! So, I figured I needed help in managing my anger. I didn’t want to turn into an unnaturally calm person who was always in control of her feelings. But, I wanted to be able to be in better control of my emotions. To be able to stop and think and then blow my top in a calm manner if you will! If that could be done, that was exactly what I wanted to find out.
The Internet being the first place you turn to for help, I found myself scouting the worldwide web for an answer to my predicament. I wanted easy answers and I found many marked weasel worded articles that promised overnight cures, but I didn’t find anything that actually worked. I then patiently spent several hours looking up genuine sites and reading personal development articles and comments posted by qualified psychiatrists and counselors from all over the world. I found quite a few that seemed suited to my needs and I slowly started applying what I read to my day to day life. The self soothing techniques I learned helped me to assess my situation and then react rather than fly off the handle first!
This shift in thinking radically changed my relationship with people and what I thought of myself. I found myself liking me better. While earlier I would not even feel comfortable looking in the mirror without thinking “what kind of monster are you?”. Now, I am comfortable in my skin and in who I am. I also enrolled in a self improvement course near my home. I found that helped me figure out who I am and what I wanted from life. The most important thing that I realized was that we all need time to ourselves. Time to think about our life and how events have transformed our lives and even our way of thinking. Time to just dwell on what is happening around us. I found a bit of yoga and meditation also helped. Long walks in the evening put things in perspective too.
I realized without a doubt that the key to self improvement and personal growth lies in self-awareness. The more we are aware of our unmet emotional needs, the more likely we are to be in control of our emotions and achieve work life balance.
Having gone through the trauma of feeling miserable because of my anger, I thought it would be a good idea to put up a website that will give knowledgeable and doable information on personal development. I will be putting together all the good quality videos and articles containing potentially useful stuff, and psychological self tools, I can find on how to improve oneself. You will also find here several tips on how to make small changes in your lifestyle in order to become a better person. Changing the way you think can completely change your personality! You may just need a few tweaks here and there to bring out the best in you.
Personal Development Seattle is, what you could call, a confluence of all that is relevant to anger management, stress and anxiety control, skills training, honing your talents, identifying your pros and cons, handling and treating depression, and anything else that may be keeping you from achieving your personal, business, or career goals.
I had always thought of self improvement as an ongoing process and not just a fixed goal that once achieved can be forgotten. But, all the material I’ve read on personal development, talks only about setting yourself fixed goals and changing the way you think or the way you act to achieve those goals. I could never identify with that. In this section of Personal Development Seattle, I want to address this conundrum. I always believed that improving myself meant changing the things that bother me about myself; the things that I am not comfortable with that persist within me. When I don’t pay attention to that niggling doubt inside me, I end up unhappy and that tends to spill over into my relationship with others too. Imagine my surprise when I come across an article that says exactly what I am thinking! Although it is pretty long, it is bang on and has comprehensively put the ‘personal development’ concept into a nice nutshell. Enjoy reading … Mathematical Equations And Personal Development By Steven Aitchison Just when I thought I was getting somewhere in life, a cup of coffee and a biscuit turns my theories on their head. Sitting in a Waterstones Costa Coffee cafe, I was happily reading ‘The Deeper Secret’, with a cup of coffee and a biscuit. I hadn’t really started reading the book when I followed a train of thought through to its conclusion. The thought started something like: ‘Have I really developed as a person?’ I then, mentally, listed everything I had achieved in the last few years: 1. Bought a beautiful home 2. Stopped Smoking 3. Had more family time 4. Started a good job as an addiction counsellor 5. Grown my blog to over 6000 subscribers 6. Published Guest posts on some great sites 7. Started getting paid regularly for my freelance writing 8. Been interviewed on 3 radio stations 9. Connected with some great people 10. Even more in love with my wife 11. Lost fat 12. Attending gym regularly and am the fittest I have been for a long time 13. Become much more productive with my time Okay, so that was good, that was a lot of evidence to prove I had developed myself, but is it really evidence that I have developed? Then I followed the train of thought: ‘what is personal development?’ Personal Development Is • Getting past your comfort zones and stepping into unknown territory • Standing up to your fears and kicking their arse • Doing something that will develop you in some way • Becoming the best person you can be before you die • Giving yourself to others in order to help them grow • Experiencing life as part of a community mind and not from a ‘Me’ mind So going by my definition of personal development I have to scrub out what I think I have achieved over the last few years and re-evaluate it, to check if it comes under the heading of personal development: Bought a beautiful home (NO: It’s our perfect home and the right size but from a personal development point of view it means we have to work more years to pay it off). Stopped Smoking (NO: I actually enjoyed smoking, that might sound crazy but I did, I stopped smoking to stop my sons telling me I was going to die very soon. I know all the bad things about it and I’m really fooling myself into thinking I enjoyed it, but the fact is, I did enjoy it.) Had more family time (YES) Started a good job as an addiction counsellor (NO: Working for someone else, even with a good job like this, has never appealed to me and I’ll always look for a way to go it alone). Grown my blog to over 6000 subscribers (NO: It’s another badge to add to my blog and a bit of social proof that people like what I am writing, it’s saying to people ‘look how many people like me, I’m really popular’ but it isn’t really saying that at all, it just means I have found a way to get readers to sign up to my RSS feed or newsletter). Published Guest posts on some great sites (YES: I Enjoyed writing for some of the sites) Started getting paid regularly for my freelance writing (YES: It’s one step closer to my dream of working for myself). Been interviewed on 3 radio stations (NO: I hated being nervous before the interviews and not saying what I really wanted to say, that’s what so great about writing you can press the delete key and start again, with a live interview you can’t) Connected with some great people (YES: I have made a lot of false contacts when it’s connecting with people for the sake of it or just to bump my Twitter, Facebook, SU number ups, but I have met some real, genuine people online who I would go out of my way to help if they asked). Even more in love with my wife (YES: Our relationship is continually evolving which means having enough self awareness to grow) Lost fat (YES: I was unhappy looking 3 months pregnant) Attending gym regularly and am the fittest I have been for a long time (YES: It’s for me, it makes me feel good) Become much more productive with my time (NO: I am lying to myself, I haven’t become more productive I have just created more time in my day by getting up earlier and working later) Personal Development Lies Inside You ?The operative word in the phrase ‘Personal Development’ is ‘Personal’. It’s something that means something to you and nobody else. It’s sometimes easy to forget, in our quest to be all we can be, that we look to external factors to provide us with the feeling of satisfaction and to feel that we are growing in some way. Having a bigger house means nothing more than being somehow able to afford a bigger house. Having 10,000 subscribers means nothing more than 10,000 people subscribing to your RSS feed. I had a goal to reach 10,000 subscribers by 31st December 2009, and I still do, but at the end of the day it doesn’t mean that 10,000 people like me and my writing. If I am unhappy about something inside me and I work to get rid of the feeling then I have, personally, developed myself. If I am full of rage all the time and I work on my issues of anger then I have, personally, developed. If I manage to get better at writing simply by the very act of writing then I have, personally, developed. Personal development is a feeling within us. It’s a true feeling of being happy about an aspect of our life. If I am happy that I am 200Ibs but people keep saying to me ‘oh, you’ve put the beef on’, should I then do something about it? No, absolutely not. If you are happy, then there’s no need to do anything about it as long as you accept the possible consequences of your actions or inactions and are being totally honest with yourself. Being Authentic ?Having followed the train of thought a little further down the track I started thinking about the blog and whether or not I was really helping others with the articles I was writing. Honestly! Not all the posts said much that hadn’t been said before. There are a few articles I have written that I am quite proud of, and feel they say something meaningful, others I’m not so proud of feel they have been regurgitated from books, blogs, websites, and other stuff I had read. There was nothing original. It actually started to get me down and then I looked at other self development blogs and most of them are the same, by that I mean they are sharing information that has been said elsewhere, however, and this is a huge however, they were saying it in a different voice, they are saying it authentically and sometimes from personal experience. Even the top personal development blogs were saying a lot of what has been said before, but they were saying or presenting it in a different way, they had a unique way of presenting the information and being authentic about it. The Originality Of Mathematical Equations ?As a personal development blogger I strive to come up with original writing and it got me down when I couldn’t do it all the time. Until the day I was helping with my son’s homework and he was doing equations and percentages at school. I showed him a different way to present 4/25 as a percentage. He had been shown the calculator way whereby you divide 4 by 25 and then multiply by 100, which is great. I taught him to do it in his head as well by asking what do you have to multiply 25 by to make 100 = 4, now multiply the top part of the fraction by 4 = 16 and there you have your answer: 16%. He was very happy and said: ‘That’s a new way of working it out. Why doesn’t the teacher show me that way?’ I explained that the teacher needs everybody to do it the same way as it would take her 5 times as long to teach the sum if she was showing 5 different ways of doing it. It’s exactly the same with writing about personal development: you might be teaching someone how to reach a goal, which has been taught a hundred times before but there’s more than one way to show how it’s done. That is why ‘The Secret’ was so successful, it was done in a totally different way from anything that had been done before, it’s the same information that has been written about 100 years earlier by the likes of Wallace D Wattles, Napoleon Hill, James Allan, Christian Larson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Life is the same nearly every day, you are more than likely not doing anything original but that doesn’t matter, who says it has to be original? You just have to make life as interesting as possible and take lessons from the many classes life has to offer. Faking Personal Development ?Sometimes, well a lot of the time, we fake personal development. What I mean by that is we tell ourselves we’ve changed in some way when in actual fact we haven’t. The classic is going on a diet. You’ll hear a lot of people saying ‘I will start it on Monday’ which basically means they are not ready for it but will be ready by Monday. And then when the diet’s started, they say things like I ran an extra mile today so I can have this Mars Bar, and all sorts of crazy justifications. The truth is dieting is a lifestyle, it’s not temporary, it’s a way of being, a way of seeing, and a way of doing. Personal development is also a way of being. I have pretended to be much more productive and told my family, I have written 3 x 1200 word articles today that must prove I am productive – absolute rubbish, it just proves I have either: written it extremely quickly, the content is garbage, I haven’t done any research or I found some extra hours by stealing them from family time or sleep time. More often than not I would steal the extra hours from my sleep, so I would get up at 4.30am and start writing, instead of lying in bed until 6.30. That’s not developing myself, that’s kidding myself. The truth is I am happy twittering away, or stumbling sites or commenting on other blogs. When the business really takes off then I will need to re-evaluate my productive ways and cut down on twitter, Stumbleupon, reading other blogs and commenting, I’ve actually had to start doing that recently because of the work coming in so I am becoming more productive but it now seems more of a chore rather than enjoyment, so it’s time to re-evaluate and look at making it fun and productive. Look at your life and be honest with yourself and ask if you’re faking personal development. It doesn’t really matter, as the only person who will know the truth is you, if you are faking personal development there will be a dissonance within yourself which will eventually lead you to make the real change you want to or forget making the change altogether. However, it’s better being honest with yourself now rather than later. Conclusion ?Personal development is a way of being, it’s not about getting extra badges for your jacket of life, it’s not about adding accolades to your CV, it’s not about having 1 million friends on Facebook. Personal development is about being self aware at all times and having the ability to recognise what areas you want to change and making plans to change them. Recognise when you are faking personal development and work to put it right or at least be honest with yourself. Are you faking it or making it? Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Steven_Aitchison
Listening to music, gardening, meditation, and reading are some of the ways in which you can fight stress. Interestingly, no drug is recommended for stress. Stress is considered an emotion, a state of mind, not an illness. The way we react to situations is what causes stress and depression. We subconsciously decide how we want to react to a situation. You must be thinking: “Now who would want to be stressed or depressed?”. But, several years of research shows that we live primarily by reflex and our reactions are all due to subconscious programming.
Our reactions seem robotic! When we look around us, we see so many people stuck in jobs they hate, and take their frustrations out on their loved ones. It is important to take control of our emotions and refuse to get stressed. An interesting thought that is floating around is that we let ourselves get stressed because of sheer laziness. Most people are good at making conscious decisions about business deals and such but when it comes to maintaining a calm state of mind, they slip up. Nobody wants to take the time or effort to address the issue that is causing the stress. We would rather indulge in it and allow ourselves to be dragged into depression. When we live normally, we live automatically. That is, we do not think about our reactions and we are never in control of our response. It is only when we are suddenly blown away by a beautiful event like listening to some great music, or watching a sunrise that we are in the right state of mind. Being always in a positive state of mind is also not quite the right state of mind. It is only when you are totally involved in whatever you are doing, that is, living completely in the moment, that we are in the right state of mind. Meditation helps us achieve this. It helps us quieten our thoughts, relax, and discipline our mind.
If meditating is difficult, maybe we could do something differently everyday instead of following the same routine day after day. This can also help us concentrate in the moment better. This is sure to break our pre-programmed automatic behaviour patterns. When we learn to focus on what we do, think, and how we react, we reach the perfect state of mind.
When people believe that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, they are complacent and believe that medicine can set it right. But, they fail to take one more step to find out what caused the chemical imbalance in the first place. When we decide to find out the reason for this, we take our first positive step to getting rid of depression without medical intervention. People who find it difficult to cope with strenuous situations are the ones who usually end up depressed. The key to treating depression naturally is to find out why we are unable to cope. For example, losing a job could be stressing us out as we are not really qualified to find another similar job. So, equipping ourselves with the proper skills and training could end up removing that fear and make us confident enough to look for another job.
Drugs given for depression tend to make you believe that situations are out of your control and that your reaction is purely due to some inherent defect in your genes. The key to overcoming depression is to be very clear about what you want from life and prepare yourself to handle all eventualities. This will keep you from caving in to depression when sudden change happens.
The feeling of being totally lost and abandoned with no hope in sight is quite common in those who are ill-prepared for life. This causes stress and the resultant depression.
When we are children, we are taught different subjects in school but we are never taught how to handle disappointments, and how to prepare ourselves to accept change. I think if we all start early enough to accept and handle change, depression will not affect as many people.
If you are stressed out and depressed, take a moment to think your life through and see where you can make positive changes to your mindset. This exercise should put you back on track faster and surer than any medication.
