“If you wish to achieve worthwhile things in your personal and career life, you must become a worthwhile person in your own self-development.” Brian Tracy

Ultimately there will be returns in this journey of yours, according to your attitude will these returns be defined. The main objectives are growth or development, personal fulfilment or satisfaction and their inevitable consequence, happiness. It’s a trek without rights and wrongs and will have many course corrections en route. The root cause or the source of these three legs to the tripod upon which this aspect of your your life sits are different for each individual. That difference is a sacred property and is the key to our mutual development, providing there is respect and understanding.

Before you there are two bodies of work that represent your potential guidance systems. If you are prudent you will look for guidance, you will try to find a mentor, someone or something who knows what it is you are after and has some of it themselves, you will then try to extract whatever gems you can from the mine that they represent.

What are these two bodies of work? They are the synthesis of what other people have experienced and tried to formulate in ways that can be passed along to others. One is Academia, the other is the Self Help Movement.

Academia can be too rigorous, demand impossible proofs and serves only to make itself irrelevant to the vast majority of people and Academia flirts with the truly significant questions without really producing satisfactory answers.

The Self Help Movement gets carried away with itself and has a tendency to over promise and make outrageous claims that it can never really substantiate – this proneness to over hyping and under delivering damages its credibility. These two consider each other with wariness from afar, resentful of their respective merits and feeling mutually threatened. Both camps have great strengths but need to be moderated. The silverbacks of each discipline regard the luminaries of their respective positions as misguided and refuse to give ground. Unless your livelihood depends on either, you do not care about this, it is not your struggle, you simply want to know what is best to do for your own life.

Between the swings of a pendulum there is always a third way that embodies the best of each opposing discipline. Remember that here we are talking about personal fulfilment, happiness and self development; two camps believe they have the tiger by the tail but you are not aligned to either, you are just wanting to progress and do the best you can with what you have at your disposal. Does that sound quite familiar to you? Your journey towards leading a fulfilling and purposeful life is probably the most important adventure you will ever undertake. It will open doors to rooms you may never have known existed and will shed light upon a universe of possibilities that you may not have dared to imagine since you were a small child. This is what you were born to do.

The payoff or return is the ability to choose. To choose in an informed way what you want to do with your life and how you will contribute and add to the progressive wave of human expression. It’s quite simple really, and the first step requires only that you say ‘yes’ to it.

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