Personal Development Part 2 — The beginning of my journey
The last 2 years Personal Development (PD) has become a bigger and more important part of my life. That’s the time I have actively and consciously been working on PD.
“One needs to be able to love and enjoy itself to be able to love and enjoy others.”
This sentence is the very meaning and starting point of why I work with Personal Development and has a special meaning to me.
The person who said this to me was a participant at the first PD course I attended and truly served as an eye-opener for me.
I told this person that the main reason why I had attended this course was that my ex-girlfriend who, in a very respectful and constructive way told me that I really had to work on my self-esteem. There was no problem at all with my self-confidence and I will get back to this but the problem was that it was compensating for my low self-esteem.
I see this in so many people in my surrounding. People are not able to enjoy and love others or enjoy life in general just because they are not enjoying and loving themselves. Subconsciously a lot of these individuals take the easy way around their issues by getting into a relationship. In the relationship, they can hand over their issues to the partner and share the burden and overcome some of the pains in the short-term. But that's usually how the relationship ends up, in a short relationship since the person is not loving and enjoying itself and therefore not able to love and enjoy it’s a partner. Once again the person is back at step one. Facing its own problems and challenges on its own.
So, I was talking about my own low self-esteem. I have obviously reflected A LOT about the reasons behind it and think I’m starting to get close to a somewhat complete answer. I will not bore you with the whole story but instead focus on one of the main reasons being my professional motocross career.
Motocross was my life from the age of 3–23 and I competed between the age of 7–23. It doesn’t really matter what sport you perform but when you compete on a professional level you identify yourself with the sport and your performance. You dedicate yourself to sacrifice the time and effort that’s needed for the sole purpose of becoming the best.
How good of a person you are is more or less only measured in your performance and everything circulates around performing. In the long-run, a life that’s circulating around performance becomes very hollow and unsustainable, just as my self-esteem. I had not been focusing on my inner me, my values, and getting to know myself. All that was put aside.
I strongly believe that’s the reason why professional athletes often become depressed and in some cases even suicidal when they quite their sport. They lose their whole purpose and identity with the sport.
We all go through crises and hard times in life but what differs between people is how good they can handle these setbacks which are related to how well prepared they are.
My strong belief is that to successfully perform PD you need to have come to the realization that this is important for you and that you are strong motivation. You need to accept the fact that this is a life-long investment but also the most important investment one can do.
