Finding your purpose for self-improvement can be a daunting task. There are many things to do, so much to learn, places to go, and people to meet. How do you even begin to narrow down what you want out of life?
1. Find your passion
Passion is a key ingredient to self-improvement and personal growth. If you’re not passionate about something, you’ll find it hard to stick with it. There is a misconception that people need to have passion for what they do, but it’s more about making a concerted effort to do something you like. This may seem like an obvious statement, but too often, people get caught up in life’s busyness and lose sight of their priorities. Don’t let your passions take a backseat to bills and chores. Discovering your purpose starts with evaluating your passions.
List all your hobbies and interests, even small things such as watching TV shows or reading books. Create a picture of your interests and how they correlate with each other. Are there any hobbies that overlap? How could you turn any hobbies into new skills? Now that you have a list of your interests, think about what trends emerge from your list: What do you find yourself doing again and again? What types of things do you enjoy? Where do you always seem to go back to? This can be a great starting point for identifying what brings you joy and would be worth dedicating some time to developing further.
2. Ask yourself what you want out of life
If you feel stuck or as though you’re not getting anywhere or achieving any goals, it might be time to take a step back and examine your purpose for self-improvement. What are you trying to achieve? What are you trying to learn? How do you hope to better yourself? It’s important to ensure that your work towards those goals is effective. For example, if something in your work life isn’t satisfying anymore and you decide to search for a new job, think about what workplace characteristics were dissatisfying and how they could be resolved. If you took a different approach than that and simply quit your job without really thinking things through, then it is more likely that the next job you get won’t be much better. You need to try to solve the problems at hand, so they don’t occur again. To figure out what is going wrong in your life, ask yourself why things are happening the way they are.
3. Consider past experiences
It’s easy to feel discouraged when you look back at past mistakes and missteps, especially ones with a lot of emotional weight. They can be hard to let go of because they make people feel like failures. Especially when trying to make changes and improve behavior in any way, it’s easy to think that everything you have done up to this point is pointless—and that nothing you do in the future could count as progress. With spiritual life coaching, you can set goals and plans to achieve them.
A spiritual life coach can help you look at your past experiences to see if they have any clues as to the direction in which you should be moving. The key is to think about how everything fits into the bigger picture of your life. Even though you want to focus on moving forward, looking at the past can help you see how far you’ve come and determine what factors may have contributed to your choices or the results that came from them. In some cases, it might just be that you didn’t have enough information at the time—and now that you do, your decisions are better informed. The next time you find yourself thinking about a past mistake in all-or-nothing terms (i.e., “I’m a failure”), try instead to take a step back, identify what happened, and think about why it may have happened without letting shame get in the way of being honest with yourself about.
The point of self-improvement is to improve oneself, not to become a one-trick pony that can be put on display. Don’t let the physical improvement of your body distract you from becoming mentally strong and improving your life. Pursuing fitness is a difficult task, and if you set out on this journey, remember that it is hard work and will require determination. Just make sure that you are enjoying the results!
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