Top way to motivate yourself into a personal growth mindset

I learned to always take on things I’d never done before. Growth and comfort do not coexist.

Ginni Rometty

Motivating yourself for personal growth is an essential component of reaching & sustaining your personal well-being.

Although I always learned the rules like a pro, I have never followed them entirely over my intuition. The truth is by breaking some rules you create shortcuts and opportunities.

One example would be studying and living between Porto and Berlin/Munich. I spotted an opportunity and I just went for it. Although there were no official rules allowing studying full-time at two universities in different countries, I saw it as a shortcut allowing me to grow professionally and personally.

Over the years of journaling and researching the topic of growth, I came up with this checklist to make sure you are self-programming yourself for growth.

Self-programming for growth

• Be ready to try sth new

To get the life you are dreaming of, you need to open your mind to thinking differently. Otherwise, you end up living the same old but comfortable life. Permanent comfort never co-exists with growth. In order to make a leap, you need to temporarily go out of your comfort zone. Don’t worry, once unfamiliar gets familiar, you will regain your state of balance and comfort feeling will come back again.

• Don’t get upset by a failure, learn from it

Have you heard of a contrarian approach to life?

In order to experience happiness, you have to experience sadness. To experience pleasure, one must experience pain. Similar to that, you need to experience a failure in order to appreciate the win.

Having said that, there is still the impact of your failure on your emotional well-being, self-esteem and willingness to go on. Let yourself be sad, but set aside 1-2 days for it. During this time, you can cry, overeat, be grumpy. Please, don’t let other people see you at your low 😉 Once the time is up, you get over it, get back on track and move on.

I have viewed my failures as a used opportunity that led me to search for more opportunities in my life. Rejection at a job? No problem, I will find another one and it will bring me one step closer to where I need to be in my life.

• Always follow your intuition

Intuition is your gut feeling that connects conscious and subcounstious with the facts. Therefore, it can be more powerful than simple knowledge. Think about it as hard and soft skills.. Intuition is our soft skill instrument to assess the current situation and solve possible problems. By not trusting it fully, you voluntarily omit your decision-making base.

• Be strategic in your choices: make resolutions and plans and benchmark

Did you grow personally last year? To answer this question, one must set SMART goals, track the progress and conculde. I chose to do it yearly, monthly and weekly and benchmark accordingly at the end of the period, after which I would set a new set of goals based on the previous results. By doing it, you mentally check out the to-do boxes on the way to your dreal life, which is definitely good for your self-esteem.

• Don’t listen to the non-believers, listen to achievers

We surround ourselves with people we chose and people we have to be around due to circumstances and life choices. No matter what, do not listen to non-believers as they do not know your assets and full picture allowing you to achieve your goals.

Instead, listen to achievers, learn from other people’s mistakes instead of making your own. Think about it as a preventive therapy and coaching two-on-one, all offered for free and from multiple sources!

• Be your own fan

Yes, remunerate and spoil yourself with things you like to reward yourself for small wins on the way to a better life. Self-compliment yourself with or without a mirror. Do it as often as daily because your motivation directly depends on it. Even if you don’t entirely like or accept yourself, be willing to recognize and accept parts of you that you think deserve sincere admiration and complement.

• Know how to trigger subconsciousness

My pyramid of self-growth is based on facts & logics, then comes conscious choices, then comes subconscious choices, then comes intuition. Make sure not to overlook the subconscious lever because it is subconsciousness that melts together consciousness and intuition.

Subconsciousness affects our thoughts, feelings, and behaviour without entering awareness and has a powerful impact on intrinsic motivation and a subconscious reflex.

We have subconscious blocks that trigger our fears and decisions. Once starting a relationship, our past family trauma often subconsciously dictates our inner fears, which we then again subconsciously project onto relationships and our partner. To be aware of it means that we minimize or better eliminate negative consequences of subconscious blocks while programming ourselves for better life.

Key takeaway

Feel free to use each of these points in no particular order to remind yourselves that you are able and capable of impacting opportunities and your choices towards creating your dream life.

Self-programming for growth is the key that opens a door into an interesting world of transition, happiness, achievements and meeting great minds who think alike.

Katie