Personal growth heavily relies on motivation and confidence. Our success is in big part defined by the two. A crucial issue that often impedes us from personal growth is a failure to nurture our motivation and confidence.
To develop a stronger personality and to improve your qualities is a profoundly intellectual affair, and is rarely defined by external factors, but rather by meticulous work with your own personality. In this article, we’ll look at the things that often tend to demotivate us and how to tackle them efficiently. Let’s take a look, shall we?
Not having clear goals
We are often overwhelmed by an idea or a plan simply because we lack a clear roadmap. People set ambitious goals every day, like buying a car, graduate from university, or learn a complicated skill set. However, this one final goal should be approached as a big set of distinct tasks, not just a huge task lumped into one single milestone.
Try approaching this in the following manner — ask yourself, “what are the preconditions to my goals?” and “Why do I have to achieve, in order for them to be realistic?”. This will provide you with a more reasonable mental framework and a healthier approach towards achieving your goals.
Being motivated by the wrong things
In order to grow, people need to be driven by the right things. Unreasonable or incorrect motivators pose a serious threat to our progress because our path towards personal, intellectual, or professional growth is on shaky grounds.
If a person is motivated to become better at something, exclusively by possessions or social status — they are bound to fail.
To create a healthy foundation for the growth you need to have a solid “why”. A “why” that isn’t ephemeral and defined by vanity.
Passivity
Inactivity in itself is by no means productive, but it also will contribute to a loss of enthusiasm in life. The less you do, the less driven you are. Engage in things that move you, that make you more passionate about life both personally and professionally and try to improve your productivity by acquiring new healthy habits. It will help you create a perfect daily routine and focus on your goal without getting distracted. But don’t overdo!
Performance anxiety
We live in a society that is hyper-focused on performance and various ways of improving it. A society that is so centered on executing tasks at maximum speed and performance is often a negative factor for many people psychologically. This generally causes fear and poor self-image to take over large numbers of people from a psychological standpoint.
What you need to know is that if you are struggling with performance anxiety in your professional field, you have fear of failure and you feel that these aspects have a significant adverse effect on your life — you are not alone. Behaving against these irrational ideas is essential. Focus on doing more and thinking less about your self-worth. Concentrate on your actual goals like professional and personal growth, instead of focusing on your detractors.
Complacency
Complacency is almost the complete opposite of performance anxiety. We dedicate a lot of time and effort to make progress in life, but it seems some of us get caught up in the idea that we’ve reached our professional and intellectual apex.
Dissatisfaction is a fantastic asset for any person, without regard to their income or social status. However, some people do get caught into a trap of complacency, that halts their growth and compromises their professional progress.
How does one combat complacency?
- Identify the problem. Complacency often causes a certain degree of blindness to very pressing issues. Locate them and adjust your viewpoint.
- Eliminate your weaknesses. People that suffer from complacency often deal with lacking the ability to plan their future, since they generally consider that there’s no reason they wouldn’t successfully deal with things. Complacency makes us feel too confident and comfortable with not investing time in planning and strategizing.
- Take risky decisions once in a while. Complacency makes us almost always choose the safer route. Take risks occasionally, in order to be able to grow to your maximum potential.
Treating mistakes as failures
Simply identifying errors is a pretty straightforward deal, there’s nothing complicated about it. The tough part is not falling into the trap of disappointment with your mistakes. The people that are able to convert their mistakes into actual knowledge and valuable insight are the only ones that extract lessons from their mistakes. A person that fails to do so is often burdened by their disappointment, which is a serious issue for personal growth.
Be open about mistakes. Don’t hide them from your peers or from yourself and think about how you should further tackle this issue if it happens to appear in your professional or personal life in the future.
Look for ways to experiment and test new ideas. Be tolerant with your own self, just like you are with others. There’s nothing valuable in disappointment.
Being overly perfectionist
Perfectionism is very similar to identifying mistakes as failures. It can be argued that both stem from the same root. We tend to think that perfectionists are the people that devote 110% of their focus and time to ensure that what they do is absolutely impeccable. However, there’s a darker side to it.
Despite often being high achievers, perfectionists are driven by fear of failure. They don’t really enjoy the results of their work as much as they cherish the fact that they didn’t fail.
Real perfectionists don’t actually aim for utter perfection, but rather avoid doing an average job. The former type of perfectionists is, unfortunately, prone to nervous breakdowns and depression. It’s best to find your way out of obsessive perfectionism and identify the actual reason that stands behind the desire to deliver “perfect” work.
Conclusion
It’s safe to say that personal growth is one of the most important focuses that modern people covet most. It’s essential to take some time to analyze our personalities and identify pressing issues that might hinder our personal growth. Good luck with that!