Feeling Lost? How I Found Myself Beyond Self-Help
Unlock Your True Potential With a More Personal, Effective Approach To Self-improvement.
Everyone wants to improve their lives. So we start reading books, watching videos on YouTube, and reading self-improvement articles.
But none of that works, and it has become taboo that the self-improvement industry is there to make you feel good. But once you are done watching the videos or reading the book or article, you still feel miserable.
Why is that so?
I have been the victim of consuming self-improvement for a long time; honestly, nothing has worked for me.
The more content I watched, the worse I felt after it was finished. Instead of improving my life, this content consumption became my addiction, and I wasted time watching self-improvement content instead of real change.
You can’t convince somebody who loves self-improvement content that they are wasting their time.
It’s a feeling that we get from watching those videos that no one understands except us; we feel like we are making progress, but that’s an illusion of our mind.
We have made consuming self-improvement into thinking we are improving.
Because our mind doesn’t know the difference between reality and imagination.
When we talk about our goals with friends, we get the same feeling that we have achieved them. That might not sound real, but it’s real.
That is why we hear the quote that you should do more and talk less.
The same goes for self-improvement content. If you watch more content, you are less likely to implement it.
But let’s just think for a moment: is there any issue with the content we are consuming, or is the issue in the way we are consuming it?
That’s what I asked myself when I watched hundreds of videos, read the top 100 self-improvement books, and listened to podcasts, but nothing worked.
Well, to be honest, I didn’t get any answers. My mind said to shut up and watch the next video, which Matt D’Avella uploaded an hour ago.
Then one day, a thought came into my mind to watch the productivity course that I had bought last year.
I had already watched it completely, but this time I decided to watch it more actively.
The second lecture from the course changed my whole thought process.
So in that lecture, the instructor said that whatever I’m teaching is something that I myself didn’t apply at one go; I implemented this stuff one by one and in more than 3 years. The deal-breaker in our course will be if you try to implement everything at once.
That was the moment of awakening for me. I realized that whenever I try to change, I want to change everything at once.
I don’t want to feel left out. I try to change my morning routine, procrastination issue, and social media addiction all at once.
But when it doesn’t work out, I stop doing it.
After that, I changed my way of interpreting the self-improvement content, and here is the method that you can follow to do it for yourself too.
Let’s take the example of reading a book.
You can change it according to your way of learning; it could be watching a YouTube video, reading an article, or watching a course.
Step 1: Learn actively.
When we are reading, we are not actively engaging; we just want to know what the problem is and solve it instantly.
So we read to finish the chapter, then finish the book.
In this way, we are learning passively; our brain is not paying much attention to the information.
Passive learning is just entertainment.
To get the most out of the book, one must learn actively.
Here is how you can do that.
Whenever you are reading, have pencils, highlighters, and sticky notes with you.
Make a goal to write anything that comes to mind about the passage you read and put it on a sticky note. Place it on the page.
Then highlight the important message. You can assign multiple colours to multiple types of information.
For example, for me
Green highlighter = actionable points
Yellow highlighter = insightful information about the topic
Orange Highlighter = Relevant Stories
Once you start doing this, your mind will actively engage in the content and be more focused, which will improve your information retention too.
Step 2: Read one chapter at a time.
When we have piles of unread books, we want to finish the current one and go to the next, and then the next.
Because those unread books give us anxiety, we want to read all the books so we can feel relaxed.
But this will again take you to passive reading, which will be just entertainment.
So read one chapter, make notes on it, and write down the actionable steps you can take from it.
Don’t move on to the next chapter until you have taken the steps.
For example:
If you are reading a book that teaches you how to be a productive person, each chapter includes some exercises that you can take.
Believe me, I used to ignore those exercises just because I knew they were too obvious.
After reading the chapter, we think we know enough about the topic that we don’t need to do the exercise; we will directly implement the knowledge in our lives.
But that rarely happens. That is what makes the total difference.
The issue is not in the content; the issue is in our approach.
Reading is just entertainment without action.
We read to entertain ourselves, but when it comes to doing something, we hesitate to do it.
This thing changed my life; once I started doing exercises that the author was telling me to do, I actually started improving.
Read the next chapter after you have implemented the steps in the current one.
Step 3: Journal about your changes.
This step will change the way you think about yourself; once you start journaling, you will become a different person.
I’ve shared my 100 days of journaling experience in this article, which you can check out.
Once you implement those steps, you will feel a change in your life. You will see the improvements.
So note down your feelings and what you did.
For example:
If the author mentioned that, write down your self-limiting beliefs and then replace them with new positive beliefs.
You did the exercise, you replaced the beliefs, and you started feeling very great.
So, now you can say to yourself, I implemented replacing your self-limiting beliefs with positive ones, and I saw some results.
In this way, you will have a list of positive changes you have made in your life, which you can look up to when feeling down.
Step 4: One step at a time.
Once you get those positive improvements, you will want to make more changes in your life instantly so you can become a better version of yourself quickly.
But that is the way towards misery, because our brain cannot process multiple changes at once.
It works like this.
- You do something different.
- Your mind recognizes the change.
- It starts building the pathways in your brain.
- After enough repetition, it becomes a habit.
- Then it becomes your automatic behavior.
The issue is that our brains can only work on one new habit at a time.
So you will have to leave the temptation to change everything at once and build one positive change at a time.
Write down all the new behaviours and changes you want to make in a list.
Build those changes one at a time.
Don’t hurry; life is a long journey, and to be disciplined and successful, you will have to accumulate good habits for years.
That is why you fail to replicate someone else’s discipline when you try to copy their habits.
They have built those habits one by one over months and years; they even can’t do it themselves.
So how can you copy all of their positive habits in one go?
Excellence is not an act, but a habit. — Aristotle
Conclusion
Self-improvement content is there to guide you on what you should do, but you are the one who needs to make those changes; just reading it won’t make a difference.
Doing it will make a difference.
There is nothing wrong with you; you just need to change your approach, and you will achieve any improvement you want in your life.
Follow me on Medium so you can help me spread positivity to everyone who needs it in this era, which is filled with negative emotions. Mindful Kamal
Thank you for reading my story.
Kamal
