As an Inspired Action life coach, I help people grow, evolve, and implement new productive habits into their life. Learning new productive habits is frustrating. Since you don’t know exactly how to be this new person, there is a bit of trial and error involved. Personal growth strategies also confront the status quo and your natural pull towards the path of least resistance. New habits are destructive to your old life.
To move past the pain and frustration of personal growth and achieve the desired changes in your life, I recommend two simultaneous approaches.
1. Create structure. Personal growth is not easy to do. Everything in your life resists the changes you want to make. In order to deal with the pain of personal growth, you must set up systems that pull you forward regardless of your resistance.
Setting up accountability is a powerful structure that provides you with the power to choose your behaviors versus getting pulled into the habitual path of least resistance. When you set benchmarks for yourself that are beyond your current capabilities and then create accountability with someone, you create a situation conducive to change. What you monitor you can improve. As you see the improvement you get encouraged which creates the energy of inspiration within you and pulls you forward into action in spite of the pain growth creates. As an Inspired Action life coach this is one of my primary tools to move you past the pain of personal growth.
2. Surrender. The biggest element that stops you from developing better habits is the pain and the suffering that occurs when we are doing this growing. I teach my clients to surrender to the pain of this growth. It’s similar to a bodybuilder who is using the mantra, “No Pain, No Gain”. You must begin to look at the pain of growth in an entirely new way.
Begin to see the frustration, doubt and uncertainty in this way.
Breakdown is the beginning breakthrough. In the Indian culture, they have a saying that destruction and creation are two sides of the same coin. You cannot create your new life without destroying your old life. So, you must begin to embrace this destruction. You must begin to disengage from your drunk monkey’s natural tendency to move away from the destruction and the pain that you create as you are achieving your new goals. You must begin to look at it like this is part of the process.
Breakdown is the beginning of breakthrough. I like to say it in this way; Success is nothing more than a series of well-managed breakdowns. You must be able to skip from breakdown to breakdown to breakdown to breakdown without losing your enthusiasm, which means you have to begin to think about your breakdowns, the destruction and the chaos that your goals create in your life in a completely new and different way. You must begin to celebrate the breakdown, get excited when the breakdown happens. This is not easy to do. That’s why most people use a coach to go through that process. If left to our own devices, we have a tendency to go into fear, get scared, retract, pull back, and go right back to normal again.

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