How to Start Your Journey to Self-Improvement

By Rishi Aravinda

The journey to self-improvement is a long and arduous one, which is why a lot of people are daunted by the prospect of starting it at all. However, succeeding in changing yourself for the better does not have to be as complicated as most people make it out to be. When you have a good beginning and can be consistent, you’ll be much more likely to reach a good end. You can get more info on what that entails quite easily, as well.

Of course, this is putting things in a rather simplified manner, but that is the point. Becoming a better version of yourself is not easy, but it could not be simpler, either. By just keeping this in mind, the prospect of attaining your personality development growth becomes much closer to being achievable than not.

Specify Your Goals

One of the biggest problems when it comes to self-improvement or just about any kind of attempt to change oneself for the better is not having a specific enough goal. Saying things like “I want to be more confident” or “I want to be thinner” will never result in any of those things happening. The more specific you can make your goals, the more likely you are to achieve those goals. You can visit us for more details on that front.

Now, it’s worth recognizing that this is easier said than done. After all, to a lot of people, the specific goals with regards to what they are trying to achieve are not even that clear to begin with. Fortunately, there is always a way around this, starting with the fact that breaking down the goals to achievable targets makes them easier to attain.

Shorten Your Targets

Setting short-term targets is a great way to make your journey to self-improvement much easier to achieve. This is largely because big goals are composed of smaller ones that pile up over time. As such, when you set shorter targets that you can hit every single time on a consistent basis, you will be able to see results much faster than you otherwise would have.

A good example of this is saying “hello” to people that you may not know but are within your vicinity. They can be your neighbor, your classmate, your co-worker, or just someone you share a space of some kind with. This is much easier to accomplish than standing on a platform and giving a speech. Such an approach can be applied to a wide variety of situations as well.

Set Your Timetable

Another thing that a lot of people who fail at their self-improvement journeys are guilty of is not setting a realistic and reasonable timetable. Many of them believe that their goals can be achieved without putting in a lot of time and effort, and combined with vague targets, it’s basically a recipe for disaster. It’s no wonder then that they never get anywhere with their endeavors.

If you are going to succeed in improving yourself, you need to know when you can see results that would not lead to disappointment or frustration. For example, if the goal is to lose weight, you must never expect to shed a lot of body fat in a matter of days. It’s just unrealistic. You won’t become more confident in the same timeframe either nor will you become an expert in a certain task.

While it is possible to see some tangible results in what you are aiming for by reducing the size and significance of the target by a lot within a short period of time, this is not always the case. This is why self-improvement can often take months or even years, and can go on for decades in cases where a deep trauma or psychological damage is involved.

Simplify Your Approach

Now that we have the goals and the timeline aspect sorted out, it’s time to look at the part about how you are actually going to achieve your goals. With regards to the methods that you are going to use, it would be highly advised to use simple methods as opposed to complicated ones. That is to say, if you are going to lose weight, for example, sticking with the most proven approach is best even if it is boring.

Most of the time, the most dependable methods for achieving goals are those that bear fruit consistently and without complexities. Unfortunately, such methods also come with the issue of being either boring or too basic. It’s just part of human nature to crave interesting developments, but this does not always lend itself to achieving your self-improvement goals.

Take cooking, for instance. Any competent instructor would start with teaching novices something simple like frying an egg. It might boring to do nothing but fry eggs for days or even for weeks, but the accumulated improvements that you experience within that time are quite invaluable. This can be applied to practically any project you might undertake.

Streamline Your Routine

Another thing that you might want to do if you are going to achieve your self-improvement goals is to streamline your routine. Simple methods are only effective if they are applied in a consistent and regular basis. This means that you have to shape your lifestyle so that it’s as easy to achieve this as possible. You can start by figuring out how you can fit in time in your busy schedule.

If you only have a few minutes to spare on a task that needs that much time, it has to be during a time of the day that you can reliably depend on every single time. Skipping a day is going to damage your progress significantly, which is worth avoiding even if it doesn’t completely end up destroying everything you have achieved so far.

Suspend Your Doubts

Finally, if you are going to get anywhere in your self-improvement journey, you will need to suspend your doubts. Above all else, this is the most important and the most difficult task that you will come up against, largely because self-doubt has become a major part of who you are. However, if you can only suspend that part of you just until you see results, you might just achieve what you have always wanted to.

Now, it’s worth pointing out that this is not exactly like deluding yourself. Rather, it’s more about pushing your doubts to the back of your mind for as long as possible and focusing only on the task at hand. You won’t be able to do it forever, but you can certainly do it long enough to allow your successes to blow those doubts away. From that point on, you won’t need to suppress anything anymore.