Self improvement: A good strategy to live your life, by Viviana Garabello

Just a few days ago, a new year started: Happy 2015, with fireworks and cheers! All around the globe, people celebrate New Year’s Eve. Combined with it, some people seize the opportunity to make a sort of review of the previous year, fixing new targets for the coming one. They want to find more time for themselves, or they want to go to the gym and take care of their physical shape. Others may want to read more, to spend more time playing with their children, to learn how to swim, or to recover the old guitar, abandoned for so long. Certainly, it is nice to focus, at least once a year, on how to improve ourselves and our lives, because becoming a better person is the best gift we can give ourselves and the community.

I try to improve myself continuously, to the point that it is my psychological motivator every day. The New Year’s Eve procedure is, for me, a periodic and frequent system to check out my level of happiness and satisfaction. I ask myself what I can do to adjust my life when things are not going as I wish. It is like being the captain on the boat of my life, having the helm in my hands, and feeling I can control and guide it to the desired direction. There are some key questions helping to start this process: “Am I happy?” “What makes me happy?” “What I would like to have/to do with my  relationship/ career/ spirituality/ health and wellness?” “How can I achieve my dreams?” and so on. I try to answer clearly and honestly, to arrive at the most realistic and concrete action plan possible.

Probably this approach, which strongly determines how I live my life, is due to my past professional training in the quality system management. I was trained to find the issue, identify the root cause of it, draw plans to eradicate the problem, and extend the solution for future prevention of reccurrence. Also, when a problem is not there, still I used to work on improving an already good situation. I have adopted this philosophy in my real life, even excessively. In fact, I am a perfectionist, and I have suffered because of this. I get too stressed and unable anymore to release my boat’s helm, feeling guilty if I did not put 100% of myself in my duties, feeling anxious if I cannot not keep everything under control.

In fact, the negative side of self-help is about not being experts in psychology or fitness, neither dietetics or any of the fields in which we decide to improve. Consequently, even if we have a good purpose, there is the risk of falling and ending up doing worse than when we started. To do a good job with fitness, for example, it would be wiser to find a professional trainer, somebody who knows the matter and can really help us. However, there is the risk of finding the wrong person. A lot of counselors, or “gurus,” make money on the self-help business. They write books about self-learning, self-development, and some of them promote what is called “magical thinking” or the “law of attraction,” about how to become rich and to shape our lives as we desire. I am not against this kind of book, which can be positive  if authors are able to write good arguments, based on building motivation and being a real help and inspiration for some people. On the other hand, a psychologically weak person could be influenced too strongly by these messages, and could risk losing his or her critical-thinking skills. In extreme cases, he/she might stick to a sort of religious addiction to the “master,” entering some strange and exclusive groups of people, and adopt peculiar roles that sometimes the members are obliged to follow.

Despite these kind of risks, at the base of healthy self-development is an important capability that distinguishes between losing or finding yourself. This is what I define the “level of consciousness.” In other words, it is the compass, fundamental for the captain to know where to drive the boat. The more we can see ourselves objectively, the more we will be able to evaluate our situation from a different perspective and keep close track of where our life is going. Basically, everybody could practice self-help; just make sure not to fall into self-damage. Self-improvement can be a little or a lot, depending on how conscious the person is and how comfortable he/she feels about taking charge. Actually, there is an entire branch of psychology, the humanistic approach, based on the concept that humankind has a natural tendency towards continuous improvement as a part of our evolution process.

Unfortunately, some other people just passively experience events in life, believing in the concept of a predetermined destiny. They think they cannot do anything to be active and influence reality with their actions. I definitely believe the opposite, because I have been practicing and applying self-improvement for many years, and I have reached many great results in any aspect of my life that I wanted to improve. I am finally able to see the huge difference between waiting for life to happen or actively buiding my future day by day with my own hands. In this way, everybody can become a creative creature and try to shape conditions. Small successes, well focused in a determined direction, will definitely create the condition for “the boat” to navigate the right course, where the path has been prepared.

I agree with those books when they say you can achieve whatever you want if you just believe in yourself. I had chance in my life to verify it. Even if it is not easy, even if your own excuses and fears are the greatest enemies of this challenging and exciting process of change and maturation, you need to face your weaknesses to become stronger. Hence, when you start overcoming the first barriers, you also start demonstrating to yourself that you can do many new things that you could not imagine. Now is when you reinforce your belief in yourself and your capabilities, starting an effective positive circle of first action—good results – reinforcing mechanism - stronger belief - next action, and so on.

Finally, I am convinced self improvement is a good strategy to adopt in life, because it is good to become a better person. It is also the only way we have to really give a contribution that is not casual or passive. It is the only chance we have to realize our dreams, giving them a real form, and to express ourselves, feeling we are the protagonist of the precious time we have been gifted to live. Furthermore, it is a way to be thankful for all the qualities and capabilities we have received, putting them into practice and honoring them every day, doing the best we can. And my suggestion is: Make sure you have a very good dream because once you achieve it, you will see it was not so difficult, and you will feel very happy. Otherwise, it means it was the wrong dream, and you will need to restart a new improvement process.