It Ain’t All Sunshine and Roses: 4 Personal Development Pitfalls to Watch out For

Sometimes this whole personal development thing doesn’t seem like all it’s cracked up to be. Actually, it is though…taking an interest in creating our most desired life, and reaching our max potential, is a worthy way to spend our time. The days, months and years are going to pass anyway, so why not make the most of them by experiencing life to the fullest, and being as happy as we can be? While we may have came here to explore a variety of life themes that involve suffering to some degree, I believe the point of our existence is to overcome them, and be all happy and shiny.

But, like anything worth doing, it comes with its challenges. It is not always a cakewalk. There are traps into which we can easily fall that make things harder than they have to be, that cause us more angst than necessary. Being an ‘imperfect’ human, you will find yourself walking into these traps on occasion, and it’s okay. You are learning as you go, and it is all part of the experience. But, making yourself more aware of these little bastards, can be helpful in sidestepping them more often, and breaking out with greater ease.

Getting Too Attached to the ‘High’ Moments

No matter what we want in life, we are always after a feeling. We are drawn to personal development because, no matter what it is we are hoping to improve, or what we hope to do, at the very core, we are doing it because we want to be happy. We want that delicious feeling in our lives as much as possible.

So, we work on curbing our anxiety, controlling our anger, letting go of resentments, increasing our sense of trust and faith in some force beyond us that always has our back, loosening the grip of fear, not getting our panties in a bunch about stupid stuff that just doesn’t matter, and so on and so forth. As we go along our path, we will see ourselves succeeding in these endeavors. There will be moments when we are fully experiencing this longed-for states, and it feels wonderful. We experience a lightness in our being that is hard to put into words.

But, then, something happens and we feel like we are right back where we started. We have a day where we just feel completely anxious for no reason. We have a fight with someone after trying so hard to change our behavior and perspective regarding that relationship, and not let her get to us like she always used to. Our worry about a particular situation goes into hyperdrive, and all that trust and faith we have worked on nurturing is nowhere to be found. We get mad about something really dumb.

Now, these situations are certainly not new to us..in fact they were so frequent and familiar, they are what sparked this whole desire to change. But, what is pretty new to us, is those pure moments of ease, peace and happiness, where we handled things exactly as we wanted to, where we felt just great, where we felt like we were really getting somewhere.

And, having experienced these delicious moments, these lower moments feel even worse—we long for the other experiences with a greater intensity. We get all down on ourselves for still struggling, for still not ‘fixing’ the problem.

That ‘high’ we feel when in those moments when all is right with the world can be addictive when you start doing this work, and you want to be careful not to get too attached to them. Remember you are human, and prone to a host of emotions, and not all of them are pleasant. It is possible to keep that high vibration and feel that good all the time? Sure, probably. There may be some people like that out there. But, I wouldn’t make this the goal.

So long as you are living a ‘worldy’ existence where you need money to live, have hopes and dreams, have bills to pay, preferences, interact with other humans and what have you, achieving this sort of state is probably not going to happen anytime soon, and you don’t need to be like that to be happy and like your life.

Thinking You’ll Ever Be ‘Done’

When I first got myself into this whole ‘working on myself’ mess, I think there was this part of me that envisioned this perfect version of ‘Kelli’ emerging at some point. All my demons have been slayed, I am 100 percent confident in all I do, fear has left the building for good, I feel nothing but love and compassion for my fellow man no matter how douchey or annoying, and I just float through life on a cloud of expanded consciousness, where nothing can get me down. Um…NO.

Intellectually, this is absurd and we know this isn’t how it goes. But, what we feel is often drastically different from what our brain is telling us, and always holds more weight, like a lot more weight. This is why Facebook makes you feel so bad even though you know you don’t have the full story about everyone’s life, people only share the highlights, blah, blah, blah. Seriously spend less time on it. But, I digress , big time. Anyway…

Personal development is all about the journey, not reaching some end point where you are ‘done.’ Now, by this I don’t mean never feeling satisfied with your life or continuing an arduous lifelong battle with your ‘dark side.’ I mean that as time passes, new experiences come into your orbit, interests change, directions and priorities shift, new issues get triggered, you get deeper into a particular area of growth, etc…, you will always be looking towards something else, you will always be looking to expand.

Do your best to stay in each moment, and take whatever comes. Be excited about the changes, and the things you hope to be able to accomplish because of them, but don’t always be looking towards some point in the future where things will finally be ‘different.’ Relieve yourself of the burden you may be placing on yourself to be perfect.

Focusing on What Isn’t There and What You Haven’t ‘Fixed’ Yet

You started this whole journey because you wanted to bring certain things into your experience, you wanted to make changes, you wanted things to be different. And naturally, this leads us to putting our focus on what we haven’t done yet, what we haven’t gotten yet, and what is still ‘wrong’ with us. Not only does this make us feel like crap, this strong feeling of lack will block certain things from coming into our experience; all this focus on what is wrong, and what we don’t like, will bring us more of the same.

It is important you always remember to look for the good that is there now, what you have accomplished and what progress you have made. Give yourself credit for all the awesomeness that has already been created. Give yourself a pat on the back for making the decision to take control of your life and your happiness-lots of people will never get to this point, no matter how unhappy they may be. It might not be part of their path this time around. Deciding to commit to this stuff isn’t easy—there are a lot of uncomfortable moments, we have to face things we may have been pushing down for a long time, it can be scary to really go after the life we want and be who we want to be.

So, be patient with yourself. Some yourself some compassion. Don’t tell yourself you’ll be happy when X, Y or Z happens. You can start to be happy now, regardless of what is happening—we have a wonderful gift called perspective, where we get to choose how we view a situation. We can decide how we will feel about things. We can learn to embrace our quirks , laugh at our imperfections and stop taking ourselves so seriously.

Trying to Do Too Much Too Soon

We want change and we want it NOW. Us personal development folk can be quite the impatient bunch, no? We have like a dozen things we want to change about ourselves and our lives. We want to tackle it all, and get that delicious happiness, and our ideal life, as soon as possible.

That enthusiasm is great, and it will serve us well. But, don’t do too much too soon. So, if you are tackling issues of lifestyle, such as diet and exercise, don’t try to do a complete 180 within a week. Sure, in theory, you could go from eating McDonald’s everyday to being a raw vegan with no stops in between, or go from not having exercised in a decade to running five miles a day. But, in practice, this is highly unlikely—it is just too much of a leap, and all the ‘stuff’ that led to the poor decisions in the first place is still there in full force, and you wont’ be able to sustain such a drastic shift. Now, if of course, you feel great about those big leaps and they are working for you, by all means, go for it. But, for most of us, the greatest success will be with more incremental changes applied on a regular basis.

The reason I warn against this so strongly is because when we do things like this, and we fail at it, we get really demoralized. And instead of reassessing the situation, and modifying our goals, we tend to sabotage ourselves even further. What usually happens is we attempt to maintain this same level of change, but it becomes more sporadic, and eventually we migrate back to our old habits, effectively giving up altogether, and we probably won’t try again for a really long time. We berate ourselves for being weak, convince ourselves we are not capable of change, and feel really badly.

If you want to make certain changes in your life, don’t make any bold moves that your current belief system can’t support. While it is natural to feel a bit of fear and doubt when doing something new, feeling utterly panicked, and filled with dread, is a whole different scenario and one to be avoided.

For example, you may feel tempted to quit the job you hate, even though you only have two months of savings banked. Unless you feel really aligned on an energetic level with such a drastic change, and you have a lot of trust in the Universe, Source, God or whatever you call it ,that you will find a new job and that money will come to you in some way, this bold a move may not be the right thing to do at this time. When our true feelings and belief system don’t support our actions, we block the results we want, and making big leaps like this, will make it really hard to do that inner work that is necessary to mold our outside experience more to our liking.

In Closing…

I hope this post was helpful for you. When thinking about my own journey, and the things that tripped me up, these were some of the biggies. And as different as we are in many ways, we are also quite similar, and I had a feeling many of my readers would resonate with at least one of the points here. As you do this work on becoming your best self, and reaching your highest potential, remember to have fun with it. Don’t take it so seriously all the time. Remember you are human, and as such, are vulnerable to the various foibles that come along with that experience.

Your Turn…

What did you think of this post? What part resonated with you? Did you see yourself in anything I wrote here? How are you doing on your own little journey of personal development? Have you experienced any pitfalls? What tips would you give others that have helped you in upping your awesomeness quotient? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts so we can have a chat.