Self-improvement is a pitstop, not the journey
Making improvements in our lives makes us feel better. I don’t think many people would debate that. But in my experience the concept of ‘self-improvement’ feels off-putting for many. A more foreign, cunning or even cringey phrase.
It’s often linked with the prospect of considering counselling, seeing a therapist, or just chatting openly and vulnerably to someone in your life. And a common barrier I’ve found to exist is that this can feel like, well, introspective wankery on the surface. For want of a better phrase.
It seems to me that the barrier is rooted in the sense that ‘seeing someone’ means kickstarting a never-ending treadmill of wandering the planet asking questions about yourself, like “who am I?” or “what’s the point of all this?”.
In other words, the ‘self’ bit feels disproportionately weighty in the phrase ‘self-improvement’. When, really, the real purpose of the ‘self’ part should be to act as a kind of information pitstop to helping you to get to the latter; improvement.
Therapy, counselling, or being openly vulnerable has many positive benefits. But it shouldn’t be a pre-requisite for everyone, all of the time.
Vulnerable introspection should be for the times in your life when you feel as though you want to enact a change in either your circumstances, behaviours, or how you see the world, but feel unable do so.
It’s for when you feel stuck in the same patterns, unable to make the shifts that you want to. It’s in these moments that introspection and understanding why barriers might exist can be incredibly useful to moving past them. And counselling, or finding ways to truly express vulnerability, is often the only practical way to do so.
If you suspect barriers are holding you back from creating change for yourself, or patterns in your life show that to be true, then you have a responsibility to go about confronting those barriers. And learning to understand them. Because without doing so, you’re much less likely to move past them.
Because the whole point is to move forward in order to enact the change or improvement you want to, not to stay in one place with your barriers.
Introspection without action is just another word for inaction, or procrastination.
Once you’ve understood certain barriers, you’re ready to shift gears away from the ‘self’ and towards action, or improvement. In other words;
It’s time to spend less time looking in, and more time looking out.
Armed with this information, it becomes your responsibility to identify the areas, things and activities that interest you and where you can set about making improvements, and then go out and do those things.
Look outwards to the acts you can carry out. Do things. Get better at them. Improve.
You’ll become better by getting better at stuff. And the only way you can do that, is by doing stuff. Pursue skills, hobbies, opportunities that interest you, even if there’s no immediate benefit.
That’s simply improvement, without dwelling and staying stuck in the ‘self’.
OK, but what if you don’t feel like doing them?
Well, that’s when your period of introspection can show its value.
You are now able to use of your understanding of your barriers to say to yourself “oh, my lack of confidence in myself is making me feel like I don’t want to go to the gym.” That’s not that interesting. We all have feelings all of the time. What is interesting is how you react to that information. If you get up and do it anyway, despite not feeling like it, that’s interesting.
And that’s how you can switch towards spending more time looking out, and less time focusing in.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about myself, probably too much, and you know what I’ve figured out?
I’m not that interesting.
Not compared to the world out there. The world outside of me and my head. Out there exists an infinite amount of interesting things to discover, learn and try.
And the more I throw myself into those things, the better I feel.
Because trying to be interesting is much harder and more draining than just being interested. I can choose to be interested in anything I want to, especially in this day and age.
Self-improvement should become a by-product of living a life of intention, rather than a focus of life itself.
When life becomes a series of choices that direct you towards doing interesting things, and by doing so getting better at them, you make yourself better in the process. When you apply yourself to things that interest and engage you and give you value, the improvement part happens in the background of living this kind of intentional life.
So, could does this mean for your life? I believe something like this:
When to put the ‘self’ in self-improvement, and when to just do the improvement.
Have a Grey Week,
Chris