Top Reasons Why Self-Improvement is Failing You to Get the Results You Want
Of all the goals that you’ll keep for yourself in life, the most comprehensive and impactful is surely the one of self-improvement. Be it losing weight or toning your body to maximize performance, stamina, and strength; optimizing your personal and professional relationships, or maximizing productivity and creativity at work, self-improvement techniques are destined to help with all domains of your life. Considering the benefits that your effort into self-improvement claims to offer, it usually doesn’t even require persuasion for you to begin focusing on it. Unfortunately, however, the journey to self-improvement is certainly not a walk in a park.
For most of us, starting with a plan that aims at self-improvement, in the long run, isn’t that difficult. However, achieving the expected results is a whole another story since it is not an uncommon sight for someone to apparently be investing a lot of time into self-improvement but failing to see any real results. This makes you wonder “what is it that I’m doing wrong?”. What else could I do to hit my target? If you have ever focused on self-improvement, such frustration of failing to see the results must not be a new one for you.
Don’t give up, though. You have already made the decision of aiming for self-improvement so you are already through the first test. All you have to do is now remove the barricades which are disabling you from achieving your goals. In order to accomplish that, it is important that you are familiar with the shortcomings in your plan so that you can remedy them. Taking this into consideration, we have created a list of top 5 reasons why it is frustratingly hard for some people to realize the self-improvement goals that they have set for themselves.
The Way You Invest Your Time
One of the first and the foremost things to be kept in mind as you embark upon a journey of self-improvement is that it has very little to do with the amount of time that you invest in it and a lot more to do with the way you invest it. For instance, more often than not, we would appreciate investing our time into reading books, articles, and watching vlogs about self-improvement, the techniques, and how to go about it, rather than actually putting an effort into making those techniques a natural part of our lives.
Don’t get us wrong. Information is important. It is necessary to read and enlighten yourself about self-improvement. But the moment you completely overwhelm yourself with the information leaving no time left for actual implementation is the moment you have gone off track. If you would like to realize your self-improvement goals, therefore, you are going to have to cut back a little on reading and use that time to practice and apply whatever it is that you have learned so far. Reading alone is meaningless unless you have an intention to actually apply the knowledge in your real life.
Testing Your Limits Of Patience
How many times have you actually tried to focus on self-improvement but ended up submitting to the failure in a few days or perhaps? This is what highlights another crucial factor that defines why you are unable to achieve self-improvement goals. Now when you start to invest your time and effort into self-improvement, make sure that you keep a realistic target for yourself. It is going to be harder than it sounds, trust us. After all, who doesn’t want to get all ripped and toned with a work out regime that you need to follow for only 40 days? But what needs to be remembered is that great things take time.
If you believe that sticking to your plan for just a month should dramatically change your personality for the better, you couldn’t be farther from the truth. It’s funny that we are willing to invest literally all of our life into achieving our financial goals and yet we want self-improvement to start showing within a matter of a few days. So, the reason why you are failing to hit your target is that you lack patience and give up a little too soon because your mind tricks you into believing that your effort isn’t doing anything for you at all. Give it time, and eventually, you would certainly be able to see the results.
Persistence More Than Anything Else
Let’s take an example of physical fitness as part of the self-improvement goal. Imagine that you have a goal of losing a few pounds and tone your body to look the best that you can. You have devised a strategy for yourself to achieve this goal that requires you to work out for five days per week in the gym and transform your diet into a healthier one. Blame your own laziness or the hectic schedule, here’s what is likely to happen. You will go to the gym for two days in a row and then take a hiatus for the next four days. Then you’ll go for a day again and miss the next two. In the meantime, you will eat healthy for a day and reward yourself with a dozen hamburgers the next day. Do you see it yet, why you fail to see any real results of self-improvement?
Yes, you are right. The answer lies in persistence. Following the plan for two days and being ignorant for four isn’t exactly the definition of sticking to the plan. You can take things slow, incorporate one change at a time into your routine life, but whatever it is that you adopt, you need to make sure that you are following it with persistence. It won’t be wrong to state that the lack of persistence is the number of reasons why people fail to realize their self-improvement goals. You can’t just keep up with the techniques as a matter of your own convenience. The commitment, dedication, and persistence that you should in practicing the self-improvement techniques determine whether or not you’d be able to see the results.
Perhaps You Need An Expert
It goes without saying that self-improvement is a broad concept that deploys a wide range of different techniques to lend you a helping hand in achieving your goals. A fair amount of such techniques are easier to practice and can be followed all by yourself without the need of an expert. But a few of the more advanced ones, which, by definition, are there to offer better results as well, require taking help from an expert or a trained individual who can put you on the track.
What’s more, is that a few of the times, you may find yourself failing to implement the simpler techniques with perfection as well that may hinder your progress towards your self-improvement goals. For instance, practices like meditation, mindfulness, yoga, etc. are apparently simple, to begin with, but you can’t rule out the possibility of less than ideal results because the techniques are not practiced with perfection. If you identify yourself as one such individual, it would be a wise decision to seek the help of an expert, at least in the beginning to get you going. Once you are in the flow, you would then be able to continue with these practices without having to compromise in terms of the results.
It’s Hard To Fight Temptation
Lastly, the reason why you might have been failing to see the results with your self-improvement techniques is that like everyone else, it’s hard for you to fight temptation. The truth of the matter is that it’s not always convenient to bring a change in your life. For self-improvement, you may even have to take a step back from a few people because they have been influencing your life negatively. You may have to stop yourself from eating your favorite food or indulging in your favorite leisure activity.
All of such temptations have a way of fascinating you with the idea of giving up and focusing on YOLO (You Only Live Once) to trick you into doing whatever you want. For the optimum results out of all of your efforts into self-improvement, therefore, you are going to have to remind yourself of the goal and the reason why you began its pursuit in the first place, in hopes of keeping yourself motivated and inspired so that you don’t give in to such temptations.
Final Note
You have made a decision of focusing on self-improvement and we surely appreciate it. It’s the best thing that you can do for your life in the shorter as well as in the long term. We can understand the frustration of failing to see the results even while you think you are spending a lot of time into self-improvement. But we certainly don’t want you to give up because of such frustration. Now that you are aware of the top five reasons why you may have failed to realize the results and hit your target so far, you are in a much better position to finally start getting the most out of your effort for self-improvement.
