How Thinking Causes Personal Growth

Have you noticed that time flies by faster but you never seem to achieve anything worthwhile or grow in your life. A change in thought causes growth in ways that can change all that.

You just have to be willing to embrace the idea that you can change and often in a big way.

I want to look at how to make better use of the time we have so that life doesn't pass us by quite so readily without us having something really worthwhile to show for it.

Life versus Time

It's only recently in my life that I figured out that you never stop growing.

By that I mean in a personal way as opposed to a physical way. Some people call it spiritual growth; others call it growing in understanding, or maturing which is literally "growing up" from a mental childhood that can linger on long into adulthood.

I think of it as all of those things and more.

It's not until you get as close to the age of thirty that its starts to hit you that life isn't so long as you believed it was when you were a youngster. I talk to other people and they tend to agree it really hits home when you get to the age of around fifty.

Time sort of mentally compresses as you get older. So that while real time remains constant, the way that the brain processes time does seem to make it appear that it's going faster.

Take Advantage of Life While You're Still Young

That's why it makes sense to live life to the full for as long as you're able. It starts when you're young enough to be physically able to do all the things you want to do yet old enough to appreciate them with a mature head on your shoulders.

The reason for this is that there is one thing nobody can do anything about and that's the relentless forward march of time. It does not and will not wait for anyone! So if you don't get on the boat and enjoy the ride, you'll miss it and never get a second chance.

That sounds awfully harsh and set in stone, but the thing is that, well, it is! You might say that you're happy in your life but if you were to really look long and hard at it, would you be able to say that you are living it to the full?

Are you enjoying everything that life has to offer?

Life Offers but Are You Taking?

The truth is that most people don't enjoy all the things life has to offer them. Do you know that the worst part is the vast majority of those people don't even know it? What happens?

You grow up, leave school with (or without) qualifications. Get a job, get married, have kids, watch them grow up and leave the nest, get to retirement age, bumble along for a few more years (if you're lucky) and then you die.

All through those 60 or so years, you maybe enjoyed your two weeks vacation each year in a nice place. Maybe you were able to get away from home, maybe aboard in another country and spend the time laying on a beach and doing the things that holidaymakers tend to do.

The rest of the time is the day to day humdrum of getting the kids to school and getting yourself to work. You probably do a job that pays the bills but that few would say hand on heart is their ideal vocation in life. You spend the weekends shopping, visiting relatives, fixing up the house or garden.

Wasting Spare Time

The time you have spare, like in the evenings is usually spent on the sofa watching TV for a few hours before going to bed. Everything seems pretty normal to you because it's what everybody else is doing pretty much.

This activity is not often seen as time wasting either, probably because the kind of entertainment that television shows provide us with have become so ingrained in our lives that we don't see watching them as wasteful.

Yet it is incredibly wasteful when you consider what the three or four hours you spend in front of the TV set each day add up over the course of a week, a month or a year.

Stop and think about that for a moment. Maybe do some quick mental arithmetic and tot up how many hours a week you spend doing nothing but watching TV. It can become frightening to see how much of your life is being thrown away this way!

If you never thought about it like this, or even knew that you could coach yourself in personal growth by learning how this works, you might never realise the truth. Before you know it, twenty years gets past you somehow and you look back on it and think to yourself: Twenty years gets past you somehow and you look back on it and think to yourself:

"What have I actually done in all that time?"

The stock answer is something like, "I raised a family and maintained a stable household and prepared for the day I will retire." That's fine because it's what everybody does, right?

Well, actually it's what most people do but not everyone.

Harness Time and Use It Wisely

A few free thinking souls in every thousand break out of that mould and go live the life they choose.

For example, they travel around the world, or they become top sportspeople, or they get rich, or they make it as a media household name in movies or TV or in the music biz, or they do amazing charity work: In short, they excel at something most other people don't.

"How do they do it?" you may ask. "Surely they had a lucky break or a head start in life that I never had," is another stock excuse for not doing what "they" did or are doing.

The truth is that anyone that achieves anything in life that is (or appears to be) of a greater nature to most "average" people did so without any lucky breaks or head starts over the rest. They achieved whatever it is they achieved because they chose to do so.

Of course, there are always plenty of people who inherited their wealth from their parents or relatives, but unless they had the same mind set as their benefactors, they generally manage to lose that wealth or misuse it pretty soon. Those that keep it and make it grow do so because they understand how to.

However, there is one important point most people miss when judging "rich" or "powerful" people. They all had to earn it from scratch somewhere along the way. If they inherited their wealth or power, then their parents had to have created it, or their parents before them.

The point is that nobody became wealthy or powerful or achieved fame or noteworthiness without having earned it. Or in the case of wealth or power, they inherited it from someone who earned it in the first place (*see Note 1 below).

How to Think Achievement

Achieving things in life that are outside the accepted norm of the millions of ordinary people can only happen when a person decides to step out of that "norm" and go for the thing they want. It's caused by a change in thinking more than anything else and goes back to what I have been saying in related articles here on thought such as "The Strangest Secret", which is you become what you think about most of the time.

You have to make the decision that you're going to go after something bigger than what you already have. Before you can do that, you have to have had the idea form in your mind of something that you really and truly desire in life.

That can happen when the mind is stimulated in some way, which can happen either by reading about something, seeing it on TV or in a movie or hearing about it from someone else. But the most powerful driving force comes when you get the idea in your mind from deep within your own self which comes from deep, original and creative thinking.

And where does that come from? It comes from practising mental relaxation techniques such as meditation and quieting of the thoughts. This process allows true, deep thinking to occur and ideas and hunches to formulate in your mind without having been initiated by external influences.

Take the Idea and Turn it into Reality

Once you get an idea form in your thoughts of something you earnestly desire to have or to do or to achieve, the next step is in taking action to bring it about. No one ever achieved anything by sitting in a chair a dreaming about it, as I believe I have noted in several places around this site already.

You have to dream of course but then you have to get up out of that chair and do something or nothing is going to happen all by itself! The process begins with a thought, an idea or a hunch of some kind and then grows into a desire which is so strong that you have to follow it through to its happy conclusion by taking the necessary action to bring it into your life.

If that thing is increasing your wealth, you need to have an idea of how to do that and then start working toward making it happen. If it is in achieving a sporting goal, you know you have to get training and improving your skills to become the best at what you do. If it is gaining political power, you have to start putting yourself out there, learning how to speak in public and how to make people believe in you so they'll vote for you.

The point is, whatever it is you decide you want to get out of life, you have to have it in your mind that you believe you can do it before you can physically achieve it.



*Note 1: As for power (and I'm talking in a political sense) the only people that ever inherited it were those from regimes that were not necessarily democratic or fair, which is different from the kind of civilisation we enjoy in this country. Some countries have monarchs and royal families that also inherited their status and wealth. But they are in such a minority of the population as to be discounted for the purposes of this article.

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