Personal development is a wonderful thing. It can help you improve your health and body, your social life, your happiness and financial situation. But there are also a few pitfalls. A few, pretty serious problems I have run into myself. Stuff that can really hurt you and your life instead of improving it.

Here are two such sneaky traps.

1. Personal development information becomes a place where you can hide.

There are many ways to escape reality and the suffering/pain/uncomfort you may be experiencing. Drugs or too much shopping, TV, exercising or World of Warcraft can be such ways. So you may realize that and have started to get interested in personal development material to leap out of such escapist behaviour and improve your life.

Just be careful so you don’t jump from one such way of escape into another.

If you are reading a lot of personal development books but are not taking much action to improve your life or if you feel a sort of high every time you read a about a new, exciting idea that you think will “fix” your problem then you may be using personal development as an escape. Just like WOW or shopping each new article or book may give you a temporary high that you start chasing. Instead of a tool that you use practically in your own life.

Now, I think a lot of people get stuck in reading for some time when they first start learning about this stuff. That’s pretty natural since you’re new to it all and perhaps a bit confused. But at some point you have to review what you have done with what you have learned so far. And become aware that you may have to start reading less and doing more.

2. You take in too much information and can’t focus on anything.

This problem can come from reading too many personal development blog or books at once. You get all these great ideas and tips all the time and want to improve everything right now. So you focus on improving too many things at once.

The problem is just that your mind isn’t really built to focus on many things at once. And change is slow. If you try to improve many areas of your life at the same time it is very easy to get emotionally and mentally drained from that process. It may work well for a week or two but at some point – in my experience – it just becomes too much and you start slipping back into your old behaviour or start rationalizing why you don’t need this change right now anyway. After a month you are pretty much back to your old ways.

A better – but less exciting – way is to for instance focus on one thing each month. That may sound too easy and simple on paper but it’s better to use this month to get one thing right instead making little progress in three or four areas. The main focus is to actually improve something in real life, not how many things you can fit into your schedule.

For instance for me, January was about focusing on what I’m eating and my new workout program. For me, the eating – portion sizes and what I eat – is now is now pretty much on auto-pilot and nothing I have to think about that much. The same goes for my workout combination of weight training and bodyweight cardio circuits.

Putting this stuff on auto-pilot and as something I just do just – like brushing my teeth and taking showers – leaves me with more energy and available focus for more interesting things right now.

Most of us maintain goals or a purpose in life. We believe we’re participating in the game of life. We anticipate that if we stick to our plan, we will achieve our goals. Sometimes events occur that we cannot anticipate like being fired from our job, getting divorced or not being able to make our bills each month. The game we’re playing isn’t always fun, and at times of adversity we look to a Higher Power to bring it back to being fun.

It is not the job of our Higher Power to make us happy; however, it is the likely job of our Higher Power to get us through our difficult times. Our Higher Power is always there to guide us, not to create miracles.

We are created by our Higher Power, connected to our Higher Power and connected to everyone else. Each time we act, speak or decide upon an action, our actions affect all others in the universe with our energy. Our Higher Power is there to guide us…to put us “on track” when we’re lost. We talk to our Higher Power through our energies of happiness, despair, fear, etc.

Everything living and dead is composed of energy. It can be argued that the attractions of energies in the universe account for everything from everyday coincidences in life to the rise and fall of the stock market.

When we’re feeling despair and losing at the game of life, we need to talk with our Higher Power and ask for a winning strategy. Eventually, ideas will come to you. It is at this time, that you must act with forceful energy to get “through” despair and back on track to winning. Have you trained for a marathon or other sporting event? Do you work out at a gym to get into shape? Ever feel like you’re not going to realize your goal? It’s at precisely this time that we’re losing the game. It is at this time, that our Higher Power shows us a path that we need to follow.

That is the time to change our game strategy and increase our energy…then we will encounter situations and people that we previously didn’t expect. Why? Because we’re changing our levels and paths of energies; when you don’t feel like doing that last workout at the gym or run when you don’t feel like it… that you break through to another level of fitness. You can break through to another level of “game fitness” also. When we change our actions and energies, we attract different situations to us. Just when we’re losing the game, we can readjust our strategy and win.

People with high amounts of energy attract more opportunities to themselves than people with low energy. People with high levels of energy seem to be more successful. Think of the president or CEO of your company or the mayor of your city. What kind of personality and energy do they possess? I bet that they don’t sit around and complain of being bored or depressed. They probably don’t shy away from others. They take action! They’re proactive. People that possess a lot of energy don’t wait for success to come to them; they pursue it with perseverance, determination and fortitude. They decide what they want and go after it; they don’t settle for what comes to them.

Additional Success Resources

A huge number of people enjoy board games. An individual gets to pick out a character, a color, a number, or whatever is to there liking and of whatever the game is offering. A game, however; cannot be successfully played without the knowledge of the given rules. Most games are played, but most people do not get the clearness of what the game is teaching. All games are teaching no matter of what age preference it says on the outside of the box. What it teaches the young and the old is the game of GIVING and RECEIVING. In any game, the gift always remains on the inside, it is a working substance to rightly change the outside of oneself to promote unequivocal happiness.

We all see life as it appears to be, we live in the consciousness of our own minds. We see death, disaster, sickness, poverty and of every limitation of every kind, and we imprint this of what we see into our subconscious mind. Most people do not believe in DESTINY. Many people, however; are put in their own ignorance of their given true destinies and are striving for things and situations which do not belong to them, and this would only bring failure and dissatisfaction if attained.

Every living thing whether it be beast, plant, or animal must continually always seek for the enlargement of its own life, because life, in the mere action of living, must always seek a way to increase itself. We are always seeking a necessity for continuous increases. Every thought we are thinking of, makes it necessary for us to think another thought, in which; our consciousness is wanting an increase of the expansion of knowledge. In our game of life if we want more, and to be more, we have to know more. The individual only really lives when they perform every given function of which they have received over and over. We are given a body to live, a mind to think, and a spirit to love.

Get rid of the continuous thought of competition. You are here to create, not to compare for what has already been created. We are not here to take away from anyone. You help others not by self-sacrifice, but by making the most of yourself than in any other way.

In every thought, and in every word expressed is a stamping effect upon the subconscious and must be carried out in every detail. If you want to win in the game of life, you must know who is your supplier because with every demand has a supply from which it comes from. We have to be prepared for the winning to commence in our lives, even when there is not the slightest sign of winning in our sights.

Additional Success Resources