At every stage of your life, there are opportunities to give your personal growth a shot of adrenaline. This is true whatever else is going on around you. If you’ve been feeling like you’re stuck in the same old cycles lately, this is a particular reason to look at ways to give your personal growth a boost. The steps below will get you started.
Have a Vision
What do you want your life to be? What values do you believe in? Who are you? Dig deep into these questions to think about what you’re after. You may find that you are very far from where you want to be, but that’s no reason to despair. You have taken the first step to better align your life with your vision. Spend some time writing and thinking about the concrete changes that you need to make and the steps it will take to get there.
Make Your Plan
It can be easy to get overwhelmed at this stage, so try to narrow down what you’re doing. Pick just one or two changes for now. For example, maybe you’ve decided you want a career more aligned with your values. You want to work in environmental conservation, and that means going back to school to get a degree. Plan for what you need to do to go back to school, including deadlines. For example, you’ll need to research universities, fill out applications and figure out how to pay for your degree. Among other resources, you can fund schooling with a student loan from a private lender. These lenders usually make it easy to find out if you are eligible, and you can look for a low-interest loan that you don’t have to repay until after college.
Change Your Habits
One of the biggest obstacles to personal growth is the challenge of everyday living. In your head or on paper, you have a big plan, but when you’re running late for work, your dog gets sick and there’s a plumbing problem, those habits completely fall by the wayside. You tell yourself you’ll get back to them as soon as things are normal again, but the truth is that life is fairly chaotic most of the time. What you need to do instead is identify the habits that will get you where you want to be and stay motivated to lead a healthy lifestyle by practicing them regularly. For example, perhaps your goal is to run a marathon. This means you need to get your training runs in several times each week regardless of what else is going on. Learn to prioritize these new habits.
Understand How Growth Works
It can be tempting to think of growth as something that just descends on us one day. When you’re slogging through a bad run in the rain or sitting through a boring lecture in a class, it can be hard to believe that this actually is the path to personal growth. Shouldn’t it look more the way it does when influencers on social media do it? The truth is that growth is the thing that happens amidst all of this, almost when you aren’t looking. Once you understand this, you’ll be more likely to embrace the practices that take you where you want to be.