Self Improvement

self Inprovement, seems like a simple concept! And what I’ve been learning the more I look into it is that...No, it’s not. It’s all over the place and everyone has some sort of struggle with it at one point or another and it can be a nightmare. It’s like... falling from a tree. There’s so many different branches you can get smacked by...and I want to talk about it.

Self Improvement is extremely important to me. Out of all the personal values I stand by, it’s the one I actually think about the most. Multiple times a day, I’ll end up having some sor of checkup with myself to analyze if I’m doing enough to satisfy my self growth quota. “ what can I change to do better? Am I pushing myself?” And that’s the pattern I and a lot of people can start to spiral into.

The concept of self Improvement is really positive and inspiring. “ keep on working to develop yourself and you’ll become the better person you could ever dream of!” “You can do anything you set your mind to!” Yeah, that sounds great, except... there’s also this one complication where some people start having unrealistic... expectations and an unhealthy mindset and when they disappoint themselves after their inevitable failure to reach their unrealistic goal... it cuts them so deeply that it impacts their self- worth right to the core of their being!

I struggled with that one a lot. The “I can never be satisfied with what I’m doing and don’t think I deserve any recognition.” Branch. Just a bad case of Imposter Syndrome pretty much. When you’re constantly looking for the next bar to hit, you can blind yourself to how far you’ve come. It’s alright, you can actually be proud of yourself without being full of yourself.

Since I value improvement so much, any sense of satisfaction with something would make me worried that I was settling and I wouldn’t push myself anymore. I wasn’t pushing myself out of passion like I thought I was. Self Improvement also pertains to self- help. You can’t grow as a person when you’re holding a whip to yourself. A big trip up can also be comparing yourself to other people. There’s definitely positive aspects of being inspired by people you look up to but like most things too much of anything can be bad.

There’s always gonna be people of a higher skill set than you so you should try to identify who you are, not who to compare yourself to! Everyone’s on their own timeline. Even if someone is the same age, or maybe even younger than you, it’s still not ok to compare how much further they are to you. You’ve also got to think about why you want to improve something, is it for yourself? Or because you think that’s what other people want from you?

If you make choices based on what others want then congratulations! You played yourself! All of a sudden...in 3 years time your hit with the realization that you don’t know who you are and you’re just living amalgamation of other peoples expectations. Let’s flip the coin and talk about the other side of the improvement spectrum. As much as people can attach their self- worth to their failures or short comings which is not good and... you shouldn’t do that! The same can be applied to earning achievements.

It’s not uncommon for people to improve, experience success and then not feel the need to push themselves any further,which can melt into them being so absorbed in their accomplishments that they attribute it to their self- worth, becoming arrogant and a sociopath. Just don’t let your “success/failure” meter affect your “ personal behavior” meter and it’ll be fine.

There are different methods to improvement too, you can be actively seeking to learn more and mindfully decipher what you need to do to grow or you can just do your thing and over time keep on perfecting your skill. There’s a lot that goes into self- improvement, it’s a whole balancing act of understanding what you want and not taking things personally and staying humble, but believe it or not, with a lot of time and figuring yourself out, it’s very manageable and can become one of th strongest tools you can use to become a really balanced, awesome and humble person.