Get More Out Of You, Get More Out Of Life!

Welcome to Beattitude! My blog’s purpose is to help you to get more out of you, your business (or career) and your life. The driving force is my desire to share with you what turned my life around – an ultimate collection of personal “best of” if you will.

The blog’s many resources, taken together, provide guidance for you to chart your path and reclaim the purpose of your life. The primary aim is to lead you into a growing relationship with yourself and the many resources within and without. It includes how to …

• Consciously articulate your purpose, vision and goals
• Build on your strengths
• Create your personal success team
• Plan for action
• Gain conscious awareness of your resources and challenges
• Have certainty about your location and direction at all times

Beattitude is a comprehensive system for growth, quite different from the kind of personal growth that most people are used to hearing about.

The very concept of personal growth is still relatively new. Notwithstanding the ancient philosophers, and a small number of people with access to knowledge before the printing press and the worldwide web, personal growth has been around for a mere 150 years. A look at life expectancy over the ages explains why only a few generations ago, there wasn’t time for personal growth.

Life Expectancy Over The Ages

Life expectancies have risen dramatically, from an average 25 years in 1300 BC, to 77 years in 2000 AD. Average life expectancy was still only a mere 30 years in1400 AD, 37 years in 1800 AD and 47 years in 1900 AD. By 2000 AD it had reached 77 years for all Americans, 83 years for Americans age 65 in 2000, 87 years for Americans age 75 in 2000, and an astounding 92 years average for all Americans except the 25% socio-economic poorest (term used by the Census bureau).

A short life cycle does not require personal growth. “Retirement” didn’t exist a hundred-fifty years ago either. In a short life the time is simply lacking for all the dumb things you can dream of, let alone pay for! As we know, everything changes with the addition of more time. Combined with the fact that dissemination of truth is a slow process – all truth must first overcome ridicule and opposition – it explains why personal growth is still not widely perceived as something you can learn, such as to read and write, which has been around a little longer. The skepticism toward personal growth is not about personal growth, but is simply part and parcel of the cyclical nature of things. Very few people believed in microscopic life, before the invention of the microscope. Right now relatively few people believe that man can alter his life. But it is in the process of being woven into the very fabric of modern society.

Let’s have a look at what personal growth is, and also what it is not, and learn from both.

Personal growth – like all growth – cannot be obtained by force. Much of society is rooted in the willpower tradition, which continues to attract followers, despite the fact that even strong people break down under its weight after a while. Forced success is always short lived. Followers of willpower-based programs typically complain, sometimes after many years of faithful following, that it leaves them essentially untransformed. The deep inner and outer transformation of true personal growth eludes them. Many realize that to win a war with yourself, you would have to be at war with yourself forever, and also that forever can be an awful long time … Personal growth cannot be achieved by being at war with yourself.

True personal growth …

• Leaves choice up to the individual
• Holds as self-evident truths and values embraced by nature itself
• Defines as success the fulfillment of YOUR purpose
• Does not try to control anyone, but instead helps to chart a path
• Emphasizes harmony, not conflict
• Promotes inner strength
• Cures hopelessness and transforms destructive behavior patterns
• Supports you in your capacity to live a fulfilling life for yourself, others, and the world at large
• Recommends the letting go of what weakens you
• Prescribes joyful cooperation with the environment
• Seeks the reduction or even elimination of resistance
• Believes all success can be learned
• Leads you to experience true power, the very power from within and without that brought about personal growth, which hitherto nothing, including medication, psychiatry, or any branch of science, had been able to do.

To think that you must reach an altered state in order to grow, is a profound misunderstanding that has many people fooled. The truth is just the opposite. Growth is the natural, unaltered state. Therefore, to grow is to find your way back to the  natural state of being, where growth is the norm.

Growth happens naturally – if what’s preventing it is eliminated. Growth is the state where you are not contrived and do not require effort, discipline or willpower to maintain. When you are in this natural state you are largely spontaneous. In the natural state you reclaim the world as it is, and you as you are.

As you are ready to engage on your journey of personal growth, the initial concern might be how to direct growth’s course. Where will the journey take you? How can you be certain about the outcome? Do you go with the desire to jump, or with the fear of jumping? Accommodating the fear may feel good for a while, and even provide the illusion of tranquility and peace, but suppressing your true purpose is like keeping a crowd quiet by taping everyone’s mouth shut. As soon as you take the tape off, they will have a few things to say.

You are not here to struggle and suffer. You are here to honor and share your talents and creative gifts, to experience love, and to be playful, grateful and happy. Depending on where you are in life, getting there will take time – as well great resolve, a willingness to learn (and unlearn), consistency and patience. Personal growth is not a fad or diet you hope to do for a while, only to revert back to your old habits as soon as possible. If you’re not ready, or if you are shopping for instant gratification, this blog is not for you.

But if true growth is your desire, this blog and my coaching can certainly help you get there. In this sense, “Welcome – please feel free to linger and roam!”