The personal growth journey is a long road, but are you really doing everything in your power to get the most out of it? If you’re like most of us, you could probably be a lot further with your development than you are by now, but you’re not. So what’s the issue? You’re not being efficient with your learning processes.
By being more efficient with your learning processes, you’ll absorb more information which makes for easier application of that knowledge, and ultimately a quicker learning curve. Build a solid foundation for your personal growth, and the growth journey is going to be a much smoother ride. Let’s look at what you can do to speed up this journey.
The relationships between knowledge and personal growth
The more knowledge you have, the more tools you have to create a better life for yourself. Whether it comes to your relationships, health, career, healing, or spiritual growth, you need knowledge to excel. Seeing that there’s no aspect of life where knowledge isn’t beneficial, speeding up your learning curve is a staple for improving your life experience.
Luckily, we all have the ability to accelerate this learning curve by making a few easy adjustments in our day-to-day lives. Knowledge is in everything, and it’s not difficult to attain. By capitalizing on your ability to learn, you become a more efficient learner.
Embracing personal ecosystems
Instead of looking at every area of your personal development as being isolated, all knowledge, skills, and abilities overlap. This means that the knowledge you gain for your career growth will also vicariously help you within your personal relationships. What you work on within the realm of spiritual growth will spill into other areas of your life such as your mental health.
It’s important to view the act of personal development not as isolated areas to work on, but as an entire ecosystem that you’re trying to revitalize. When you take this approach, the process of learning makes more sense, as you know that what you learn in one area will affect everything to some extent. To learn more about this subject, follow the link below.
Tricks to improve your memory
As your memory is the database, let’s first briefly touch on how you can improve your memory. Specifically, we’re going to look at a couple of things you can do to improve your short-term memory (and the acquisition of knowledge). This will help in the long run.
Treat personal growth as a marathon
Personal growth is a long road. If you try to cram everything in all at once, you’re going to burn out. It’s better to tackle your personal growth journey by taking bite-sized chunks of knowledge that you consistently learn throughout your life, instead of stepping on the gas and quickly running out of it.
Treat your learning curve as a marathon where you want to do little, often. If you aim to learn a few new things every day, whether it’s reading an article on Google, listening to a piece of information, or talking about a current topic with someone, you’re on a much more stable path to facilitate more growth and learning.
Chunk together information
I’ve found that associating ideas and information helps me learn quicker (and access that knowledge better), as I group those pieces of information together.
If I’m learning about mindfulness, I’ll group all the different pieces of knowledge together that relate to mindfulness. Whether it’s practices like meditation or yoga, mindful living, grounding, nonresistance, and any topic, practice, or philosophy into the same bag, it becomes much easier to access that information as it’s all grouped together.
When you’re learning about any topic, group it together with other similar topics, and make mental connections. This is a great way to really embody certain practices and ideas, as one piece of information is thoroughly connected with many others.
Staying motivated to learn
We all have an amazing ability to learn, however, staying on track can be an obstacle. If we just stuck to the framework and learned a bit every day, we would be very competent, knowledgeable, and wise people by now. But most of us don’t have that initial motivation to begin with, so let’s look at what you can do about that.
Make your personal growth a priority
As long as your personal growth is one of your highest priorities in life, you’re going to constantly be looking for opportunities to grow. If you don’t really care about your personal growth, or perhaps don’t believe it’s worth the investment of your time and energy, then naturally you’re not going to try very hard.
The personal growth journey is such an important part of your life, as it’s the process of expanding yourself in every way. The quality of your life is directly associated with the effort you put into your growth. That’s because your growth offers the keys to everything you want, as you need to learn how to do things to be successful at them.
As long as you follow through with the growth journey, you’re on a good path. It really doesn’t matter where you are right now. Whether your focus is on healing, being happier, or constructing healthier relationships, if your growth is a priority, you’ll always circle back to it.
Visualize a successful outcome
Whenever I’m working on this website, I often lose motivation or get discouraged when I see that the results don’t follow the effort I’m putting in. But then I’ll think about where I’m trying to go, how it feels to get there, and how practical it really is if I just stick to the plan.
When I remind myself of the outcome, suddenly I get a burst of motivation because feeling into what I’m working towards makes the effort I put in worth it. So when you feel unmotivated, picture the life you could have just by doing a little bit every day, then push yourself to follow through. It’s okay to have breaks, but don’t turn those breaks into breaking the habit.
Use your suffering as a generator
The best thing about suffering is that it teaches you what you don’t want to experience, and realigns you with something you do. So when you’re feeling at your lowest, use suffering as the wise teacher it is to push you a little further. Be present with those painful feelings and use them as fuel to push you away from that experience, and towards a life you want to be living.
Set clear goals
Setting clear goals is a great way to make sure you stay on task. If you’re just shooting in the dark and hoping to hit something, chances are you’re going to lose motivation. That’s why you should illuminate the path by breaking down your larger mission into smaller steps.
Incrementally you’re changing, and you should make a course of action to get to the next increment. If you’re working on your social skills from ground zero, it’s probably best to learn how to hold a conversation before building an active social life. If you’re working on your healing, focus on feeling a little more gratitude for things instead of tackling the entire trauma.
Instead of being one long tedious road, your personal growth journey should have tangible (and achievable) steps. So break down your bigger tasks into smaller achievements, and work towards those.
The best practices to speed up your learning curve
Imagine that your mind is a library filled with books. These books contain every piece of knowledge you have, from learning to walk, to every philosophy or spiritual doctrine you live by. Your goal should be to fill this library with as many books as you can over the course of your life. Below are some different ways to plump up this mental library. Let’s get into it!
Stop being a passive learner
Instead of just letting things come to you when you need them, you should seek them out! Don’t just passively learn, but make sure you’re actively learning too. The truth is, most people don’t learn because they don’t try to learn. They don’t care to learn, and you don’t want to fall into this trap.
Active learning requires some curiosity because if you have no desire to find the answers to questions, you’re not going to seek them out. When you are curious on the other hand, you might go to great lengths to learn something. The end result? You end up learning about it!
Be thankful for your setbacks
Setbacks are never fun, because they make you feel as though you’re regressing. You feel like you’ve gotten far, then something happens and you’re back to square one. But you’re not.
Personal growth is a spiral. You might go back to a similar position to where you once were, but you have more wisdom than you had last time. You may have a different perspective on the situation too. So even though it feels like you’re stuck, you’re always better off having been through that situation.
So don’t worry about the setbacks. Use them as opportunities to really learn as much as you can from the experience, and challenge yourself to take a different course of action next time. To learn more about overcoming these painful feelings of regression, read the article below.
Expose yourself to new things
There’s no wiser teacher than first-hand experience. The only way to get first-hand experience is to expose yourself to new situations in life, and residually you’re going to gain the associated knowledge, skills, and competence. That’s why your desire to expose yourself to new situations is necessary to gain as much knowledge as you possibly can.
Make a habit of pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and trying something new. Keep an eye out for new opportunities, and make sure you jump on them when they show up!
- How can I expand my comfort zone?
- Pursue more opportunities: Keys to an adventurous and fulfilling life
Open your mind to more knowledge
Open-mindedness accelerates the learning process because you’re allowing more information to enter your mind. It’s easy to shut out conflicting information, but to be as knowledgeable as possible, never shoot down new information and ideas without first trying to understand them.
Your goal should be to try and understand everything presented to you, and to see all sides of the story without forming a biased opinion. By taking everything into account, this willingness to learn is going to make a significant difference to your learning curve.
Utilize your observation
There’s so much untapped information around you, all the time. Just by paying attention to things, you can actually learn a whole lot more about your world. That’s why it’s a good idea to cultivate an awareness of your internal and external environment at all times, to pick up as much knowledge as you can.
So make sure you tap into this ability to extract information from every situation and setting by being observant. To learn more about developing this skill set, read the article below.
Learn from other people
People are gateways to information, and a conversation can provide valuable perspectives, insights, and ideas. Every person who walks this world knows something that you don’t, as everyone has lived a unique life experience.
Leverage your social skills to connect with a diverse range of people, and talk to them about a diverse range of subjects. Have as many conversations as you can, especially with people who seem very different from you, and listen to what they say.
Utilize the internet
Knowledge is power, and fortunately, there’s an endless supply of it on the internet. As everyone is connected to technology these days, knowledge has never been easier to attain. In fact, you barely need to lift a finger.
There are many sites for essentially everything you want. Videos, documentaries, courses, infographics, you name it. Start leveraging the internet to learn about different things instead of mindlessly scrolling and getting nowhere in your life.
Knowledge is power
You are always surrounded by a bottomless pit of knowledge. The problem isn’t that there’s nothing to learn, it’s that we don’t utilize our ability to learn. But by implementing the strategies talked about in this article, you’re going to make your learning processes much quicker, and much more efficient by extracting more information out of everything.