What Track Are You On?
Many people check out the price tag for personal growth and decide that it is too expensive, so they choose to stay the same as they have always been. It seems safer that way. They look for personal development and success on sale or in the bargain basement. People hope when they Google personal development that it will give them an easy formula for growth…someone else does it for them and they reap the reward of a happier, healthier, more fulfilled life. They would like to win the lottery, but they don’t want to buy the ticket. The reality is that they really don’t want to transform at all.
Personal growth requires us to accept personal accountability and responsibility and stop making excuses. It requires us to spend the time soul-searching to find the limiting beliefs, the old programming and resulting habits that are holding us back—to identify what our real values and dreams are.
We can be so occupied on the treadmill of life that doing all that extra seems like too much effort. We are afraid to let the old beliefs go because that is all we have. And sometimes playing the victim brings its own rewards. We get other people’s sympathy and attention instead of holding ourselves accountable. They simply do life for us and we think we get a free ride on their train track. The challenge with that is: the train often takes us where we don’t want to go, and then we start complaining. It is everyone else’s fault, never our own. Then we join the blame game that no one ever wins.
When we accept personal responsibility, we modify our basic thought process and evaluate first how we will respond instead of reacting and overgeneralizing. When we think first, we can now choose to abandon self-defeating habits, and we can choose to look for new ways of overcoming those habits that have created the world we weren’t happy in.
We go for transparency and authenticity and choose not to be offended when other people don’t have the same perspective. They, too, are learning to live according to a new value system that they are establishing. We now choose not to talk like defeated victims but as champions on the track called success.
We refuse to let others mollycoddle us, because we now choose not to be the victim but to be the victor. We don’t need people to sugarcoat things when they communicate with us, because we have grown in our emotional quotient and we choose truth above sympathy. We have “found ourselves,” our purpose, and our mission, and we are in the process of laying our own railway tracks to a destination called “Bliss and No Regrets.” Life is a joy and every day is filled with gratitude and happiness. Change and personal growth—so worth the price tag!
