How to Achieve Personal Growth
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.”
—Viktor Frankl
Growth and evolution require personal responsibility. Personal responsibility is taking full ownership of your life and choices. It’s having the understanding that you play a role in everything you experience in life. Therefore, you have an opportunity to influence how you experience life itself through the many choices you make every day. It is through these intentional choices that transformation and healing can occur.
When confronted with life challenges, it is easy for us to focus on how unfair and flawed life can be. Feelings of powerlessness and abuse often leave us feeling victimized by our own life. When we allow these external challenges to fester, our internal perceptions of ourselves and those around us may lead to mental and emotional struggle. However, the outside world does not dictate how we respond to it. The only thing we have control over is how we respond to these challenging life events and how we respond will ultimately shape the course and quality of our lived experience.
If you consider your life over the past 5 years, there is no doubt that you would have experienced a variety of situations that have affected you in personal and meaningful ways. As you moved through these experiences, you were presented with a choice: How do I respond? For example, how do I think about myself and others because of these experiences? How will I act? What will I focus on and where will I put my energy? Does my response lead to personal empowerment—or cause more hurt to myself and those around me?
During challenging times, our Ego comes out to play. The Ego is the rational part of ourselves that wants the world to be fair, self-serving, and make sense to us from an intellectual perspective. It is easy for us to get stuck in the Ego mindset. If we forget to “check ourselves” it can lead to an unhealthy head space where we will want to justify our reactions using a variety of self-deceptive strategies.
By no means is this to say that we shouldn’t allow ourselves time to “feel the feelings” that come along with more negative or challenging life events. But rather, after we have given ourselves time to sit with and process our feelings, we need to take the next step of reflecting on these life events and choose how to move forward.
What is great about being human is our capacity for rational thought. Challenging life experiences give us the opportunity to make deliberate choices about who we want to be, how we want to act, and what we value in life. As such, these life experiences give us an opportunity to level up and become the best version of ourselves.
Whatever might be challenging you, taking time to pause, reflect and talk about it with someone you trust can help. You don’t have to walk this path alone. If you are interested in taking that next step in your personal growth journey, reach out – let’s connect!