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Change Your Mental Diet
By A Staff Writer
One of the most basic ways to grow as a human being is to try something new. Do something you have never done before.
Personal development or self-development comprises the development of the self. Personal growth is the natural change that occurs as we have new experiences and our beliefs are challenged.
We can grow emotionally, intellectually and spiritually long after we have reached our physical adult size. Many people also believe that once we pass the developmental stages of childhood and adolescence, all the adult years are pretty much the same.
This is not true. We continue to change our attitudes, goals, beliefs and relationships as we mature. One of the most basic ways to grow as a human being is to try something new. Do something you have never done before.
New situations challenge us. Our brains have to work at full capacity to understand new patterns instead of just re-running old ones. In completely new situations, we are like fish out of water. It may feel uncomfortable and awkward, and our performance will probably be dull. But this is a terrific way to grow. This is the kind of challenge our neural nets were made for. To aid the process of personal growth, individuals must master the art of high leverage change by learning how to be driven by a quantum sense of vision while finding “doable,” high impact initiatives that challenge the stagnancy.
Research shows that behind poor results in our career lies the invisible paradigm of thinking that each of us uses when we seek to create and restructure systems or solutions.
The reality, however is that most quantum change occurs incrementally - as a result of “high leverage” decisions and actions that can push an individual in a new direction.
There are ways of creating quantum leaps through well-chosen 15% initiatives. Personal growth experiences often occur in the form of a quantum leap — a strong and radical shift from one mindset to another. There may be a number of small steps leading up to that leap, but at some point there is a big change, and it happens in an instant. Most of the time when people pursue personal growth, they simply do not invest enough time and energy in a consistent direction to achieve a quantum leap. Maybe you have read a book on getting organised and while you were reading it, the positive energy you experienced moved you closer to making a leap. You felt fairly certain at the time that this was going to work. But then you finished the book (or got side-tracked and did not finish it), and the impact of the book gradually faded. You never reached the quantum leap that allowed you to break through to a new level of order in your life. Over a period of days or weeks, your old pattern reasserted itself. Sounds familiar?
But it was not the book or the ideas themselves that failed you. The problem was that you did not invest enough sustained energy in the same direction to achieve the quantum leap.
You never reached the point of no return. Reading a single book was only a small, short-term nudge, albeit in the right direction. For a rocket launched from earth, to reach outer space, the rocket must exert a sufficient amount of sustained force to overcome the earth’s gravity. If the rocket’s engines cut out prematurely, the rocket will crash back to earth.
So what works? How do you achieve a quantum leap? You need to exert some effort in a particular direction where you want to grow, and you need to consistently sustain it until you achieve a quantum leap. If you stop short, you may fall right back to where you started. So first of all, if you are going to target a new quantum leap, you need to commit to sustaining that effort until you hit the leap. So how would you pursue such a goal as a quantum leap?
1. Immerse yourself in your goal. Get clear on your exact goal, and write it down in your own words. Post your goal somewhere you will see it every day.
2. Educate yourself on what it will take to achieve your goal. Educate yourself to the point where you become an expert.
3. Alter your environment to support the achievement of your goal.
4. Consciously change the people you spend the most time with, such that your goal is supported by those around you.
5. Change your mental diet.
6. Do not look for other’s faults.
7. Change your self talk from negative to positive.
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