Personal Growth

Investing in yourself long-term means developing leadership capacity

Utilize the variety of methods including therapy, coaching, study, training

A good investment in your career and in your leadership abilities is simply to invest in yourself. You will always be with you, no matter where you move to, what job you pick up, or what challenges you face. Investing in yourself, in skills or in your emotional strength, or wellbeing for example, means investing in your leadership capability. Leadership, when you break it down, is unique to the individual leader. So an improved version of yourself, and a support network of caring people, means improved leadership. You are the asset.

The famous life coach Tony Robbins famously says, “Most people overestimate what they can do in a year and they underestimate what they can do in two or three decades.” Be very selective of your goals - passionate, but realistic. He teaches also to adapt your circumstances to your goals. Be accountable to your goals by involving others and acting concretely on that path. Find how the goals connect to the physical needs that motivate you, including curiosity, anxiety, adrenaline, zeal. Synchronize your spiritual dreams and carnal desires, and everything between. Thus your surroundings, companions, and emotions, are all aligned and integrated to achieve your growth objectives.

We find an overlapping concept in the idea of 10,000 hours of specialization. Specialization or expertise is different from general holistic personal growth. It is deduced from the greater meaningful goals one might have in life. It is a tactic to accomplish a particular area of growth, typically professional growth, of a skill or vocation. This popularized notion suggests that you can professionalize at an occupation by roughly 10,000 hours or 10 years of experience, apprenticeship, training, etc. The idea loosely relates to psychological research which debunks the role of natural talent, emphasizing rather the potential of the mind and body to adapt to almost anything - playing the violin, memorizing numbers, learning karate, and excelling at golf for example. You can achieve expertise, whether by more than 10,000 hours or less, with deliberate practice and correct technique. But what should we do, from a deeper essential perspective, and why?

In Transcend, Scott Barry Kaufman takes the classic theories of humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, his hierarchy of needs and self-actualization, and gives it an update. It never was a pyramid, and even as a hierarchy, it’s really not about levels of needs, nor a check list, but rather an integrated holistic system of psychological dynamics. The metaphor is now a sailing boat. The boat represents needs. When you lack security and safety and self-esteem and human connection, you suffer from anxiety. Fix them. But these won’t provide you with motivation, which is represented by the sail. Self-actualization, intimate relationships, curiosity, and purpose - these will drive you forward. These are in a way or nature of preparing for futuristic needs.

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