You Must Invest Time and Dedication for Personal Development
This is the fourth in a series of five blog posts that detail the process of becoming enlivened in your personal and professional life. This way of being results from self-study and work in the areas of voice, movement, communication, and spirit. This particular article is focused on the step Investment.
In my previous blog post, I wrote about the third stage of the five-step process-- Integration. This is when you work to incorporate the skills and practices you have learned for self-betterment into daily life as much as possible. You feel the results of your practice every time you speak and move with awareness. You may be deepening your relationships professionally and personally not only because you speak more clearly, but also because of how well you feel when you communicate. When you feel well, others naturally want to engage with you. You may feel your work is done, but it is really just beginning! And importantly, your self-image is shifting to be more positive than negative.
Recall a diet or exercise program you started once upon a time. Remember how amazing it felt when you lost the first five pounds? You may have thought, “Well, I’m doing great so a few cookies at lunch will be fine” or “I can skip my workout today and take an extra work call since I’m already getting slimmer.” So you slackened your discipline for self-betterment and (you know where I’m headed with this) the progress either stalled or you started to gain the weight back. You may have felt frustrated and given up altogether.
Do not throw in the towel! This is when you enter the fourth stage: Investment. In order to make the new skills and practices you have been learning a healthy habit that will stay with you for life, you must invest as much time and awareness as possible into tending to how you speak and move with the new skills and also reflect on your progress day to day. This is the process of enlivenment, i.e. exploration and recordation to see and use new patterns of self-awareness. If you stop just when you begin to reap the benefits of your practice, you risk slipping back into old habits and patterns.
The key to any self-betterment process is to know it is a lifestyle shift. You must do the work for YOU and truly own it as an enhancement to your quality of life. What feels like work now becomes second nature the more you tend to it with the intention of becoming a more vibrant person because of your heightened self-awareness.
In the Investment stage, you must stay the course and continue finding the nuances of your skills and practices. You are different every day and the way you feel your voice, movement, and breath will be different based on your physiology, how well you slept, your emotional state, and how your body feels overall. Become curious about yourself, using self-study to investigate your voice, speech, and movement practices.
Self-study is a key component to replacing negative habits that have been holding you back with healthy behaviors that sustain a vibrant quality of life. If you do not know why a roadblock in the path to personal growth continually appears, you will exhaust yourself always working to move around it. Instead, get to the heart of what it comes. Perhaps you continually feel your face turning red when you give presentations. You begin to speak more quickly and, before you know it, your presentation is over and you have no idea what happened! You could choose to focus on simply slowing down your rate of speech and dealing with your flushed face
Or, you could understand what happens from within yourself that triggers your face turning red and, thus, setting off the chain of falling dominoes in your communication style. It could be a solution such as learning a better way to stand and inhabit your body when in front of a group which would give you confidence while presenting in front of others. You would come to know this about yourself because you took the time to look within and realize what was holding you back. You correct the first instance of a roadblock and you open the pathway to self-betterment and becoming an enlivened communicator. The time it takes to shed light on these roadblocks will keep you from encountering them in the future.
Invest in yourself. Give yourself the gift of twenty focused minutes a day to explore new voice, speech, and/or movement skills with self-awareness and realize how you communicate with others. You will find that you are fascinating and worthy of self-study! Over a few more weeks, the skills and practices become a way of being and you enter the fifth stage of the five-step process: Illumination. Here is where you come to know your shine and honor it free from ego.
Stay tuned for the next blog post that explains the final step of the process to become clear, productive, and influential