How To Rapidly Accelerate Your Personal Growth.

There’s many speeds of personal growth. I like the fast lane.

Accelerating your personal growth is about coming to terms with what you can control, making decisions and putting in the work.

There are a few tools you need to accelerate your growth. Some are obvious and others are near invisible.

I’ve accelerated my own personal growth over the last five years through writing 1000+ blog posts on the subject and I’d love to share a few strategies, in a very simple format, that will get you well on your way. They’re more conversation starters than in-depth, 10,000-word explanations. Short and sharp is the best way to start.

We’re aiming for results after all — ideally before we’re dead or climate change wipes us off the face of the Earth.

Here’s how to accelerate your personal growth:

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Don’t surround yourself with nothing but success stories.

Looking for the next strategy through the success of others is a dangerous game to play.

The best lessons don’t come from success; they come from failures, false starts and procrastination. If all you ever do is read success stories, then you’ll make the mistake of thinking that personal growth is easy. It’s not.

Follow your way.

There are many paths you can choose. You could copy what someone else has done, but I’ve found the best way is to do something you love.

Your way to personal growth is different to mine or your mate Elon.

Everyone makes different decisions and there is no one way to do anything — there is just your way. The experiences you’ve had to date will determine the route you take.

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Read Think And Grow Rich.

Best book you’ll ever read.

It will give you a handful of principles that are timeless and will help you to grow as a person. The best tool you can learn from the book is how to think about your goals and how believing your own thoughts — good or bad — will determine how far you get.

You can have the education, money and upbringing but if you don’t think you can win and visualize your future, you’ll never grow.

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Post a few blog posts.

Sharing your experiences helps other people grow.

By helping other people grow, you get to experience grow yourself.

Putting up blog posts online is how you attract the right people into your network. People will begin sharing their stories with you and how you’ve helped them. The stories you hear will have their own little lessons for you which will help you grow.

Writing a short blog post is like journaling; it sets you free and allows you to reflect.

The human experience is a complicated one and a blog post can help you understand it from afar. It’s something you can always go back to in the future and you can also send it to people who might benefit from it.

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Be on time for meetings.

It will teach you discipline.

Being on time is something many people underestimate. It’s fashionable to turn up when you can instead of when you said you would. Growing is about managing your time and this can only be done with discipline.

Being on time for meetings is a fantastic hack to cultivate your own discipline.

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Control how you react.

You’re guaranteed to come across something today that will annoy you.

Choosing how you react comes down to one decision: where will you spend your energy?

If you react to everything in your environment with a pissed off attitude, you’ll use up the precious energy reserves you have and the little willpower we have available to us.

Choosing how you react is one part discipline and one part selfishness. You can’t grow if you have no energy from reacting to everyone and everything that disagrees with your worldview. Your worldview is not perfect and neither is mine.

Practice non-reactivity.

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Do one thing that is creative.

Creativity is at the heart of all our best work.

When we use our mind to be creative we can get outside of ourselves for a while and focus on something that doesn’t exist yet, and solely comes from the thoughts we are having in the moment.

Music, writing, reading and even making videos are a great place to start. You already know what you enjoy being creative at. That’s not the issue. The issue is that many of us waste our lives not unlocking the growth that can come from creating something out of thin air.

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Learn to communicate.

Communication is how we tell people our ideas and bring people into whatever work it is that we do.

Learning to speak publicly and write are the best forms.

Talking to an audience and learning to articulate yourself will help you in negotiating, pitching, marketing and even starting a business. Writing is a similar form of communication that is worth mastering.

With a well-written email, you can reach out to a potential mentor, ask someone for advice or even raise money for your business. The key is to get good at writing and that comes with practice.

Try to write one thing per day.

That could be an email, a Facebook status, a handwritten letter or even a journal entry. The more you write, the more you can learn about yourself through your own words.

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Limit social media.

This whole growth-hacking-your-life-dream doesn’t work if you don’t have the time to put in the work.

Win back time in your day by deleting addictive social media apps and turning off notifications on your phone. Learn to get fully present and not have your phone breaking your focus as if you were sitting next to a pokies machine.

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Go to bed at a reasonable time.

Growing is hard work and having the energy is a required ingredient.

Our bodies have a natural sleep pattern that follows the sun coming up and the sun going down. Working at weird times has the potential to mess up your body clock even if you have slept enough hours.

Invest in a quality, firm mattress, go to bed at a good time, sleep 7–8 hours and make your bedroom as dark as possible. I also find cutting off phones, tablets and laptops about an hour before bed makes the quality of sleep much better.

Try it. Experiment with your sleep and how it affects your personal growth.

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Use procrastination and laziness to your advantage.

I used to think these two things were evil. That’s not correct.

Procrastination is useful for when you’re being creative. It’s how you gather your thoughts and think about what you’re about to do. Procrastination gives you a necessary break from the hard work you have to do to grow.

Laziness, on the other hand, is often a sign of exhaustion. We get lazy when we haven’t slept, or we’ve worked seven days in a row without a break, or when we haven’t had a holiday for a whole year.

During periods of laziness, our mind is compiling thoughts, lessons, experiences and future tasks in our subconscious and trying to make sense of them.

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Assume optimism.

At the core of personal growth is the belief that you can change or be 1% better than you were last year.

It takes a certain level of optimism to think like this. When given the choice in your mind, assume optimism even if you have no evidence to back up that thought. Be positive about the hurdles in front of you. Know that you can’t grow unless you overcome adversity and resistance.

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Follow stuff you love, not a career plan.

Mapping out how you think your future is going to play out exactly is an impossible task at best.

Nothing will happen to plan. That’s why career plans often don’t work.

If you want to accelerate your personal growth, then stay close to what you love whenever you have the opportunity.

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Be kind.

Personal growth can be a selfish endeavor.

What I’ve learned is that personal growth is accelerated when you learn to be kind to everyone you encounter. What you give to others determines the level of growth you experience.

“You will get all you want in life, if you help enough other people get what they want.” — Zig Ziglar

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Love yourself first.

If you hate yourself, you can’t reach your full potential.

I hated myself for many years because I was a self-obsessed, arrogant, ungrateful son of a gun. The way to start the process of loving yourself is to observe your inner dialogue.

Many of us are walking around each day torturing ourselves with what we say in our head.

Be gentle and kind to yourself. You’re doing the best you can. No one’s perfect and being human is challenging for all of us. Practice encouraging yourself and let go of the mistakes you made in the past.

Love yourself first before embarking on any form of personal growth.

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