Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.” - J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, in her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association in 2008.

There are many sites on the Internet offering various get-rich-quick, easy steps to success and other such inducements to separate you from your hard-earned cash, on the assumption that everyone wants to improve their lives.

My view is that people do want to improve their lives, and many very sincerely do buy into these schemes with the best of intentions. However, I think that these schemes ignore the fact that there really isn’t an easy, quick way to achieve personal growth and ultimately success. If there were, there would be far fewer poor people than there are in the world, and wealth would not be concentrated in the relatively few hands which hold it now. And I think that many sincere people realize this, but hope that it might be different, at least in their cases.

Stephen R. Covey, in his great book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People put his finger directly on the problem with such schemes. Speaking of the so-called “success literature”, he remarked that “It was filled with social image consciousness, techniques and quick fixes – with social band-aids and aspirin that addressed acute problems and sometimes even appeared to solve them temporarily, but left the underlying chronic problems untouched to fester and resurface time and again.”

Whatever one might think of Covey and his religious background, he has in this book produced a powerful antidote to the superficial, and ultimately dishonest, success literature that promotes what he calls the “Personality Ethic.” In another great book Covey and his co-authors Roger and Rebecca Merrill – First Things First – propose that what keeps us going, what makes us keep on trying to get better, is what they call “the fire within.”

The fire within comes from the intersection of four aspects of our lives: the mental, the physical, the spiritual and the social. These four aspects need to be kept in balance and in relation to each other for the fire to burn strongly.

The authors sum up these aspects and their underlying human motivating needs as the need to live, to love, to learn and to leave a legacy.

Many spiritual writers speak of the four-fold make up of the totality of the human person as being the mind, the body, the heart and the spirit.

I have developed, in my practice of facilitation and coaching over the years, a model which tries to combine these two approaches to personal development and growth, with corresponding ways to stoke the fire within, to keep oneself moving and growing.

Personal growth and success are not destinations but processes. We will never be able to gratefully sit down in our favourite chair and say, with a satisfied smile, “Now I’ve arrived.” The word “growth” is indicative of process. Change, as some have pointed out, is the only constant in life, and if we have the right relationship to change, we turn it into growth. And the right relationship to change is to see it as constantly new opportunities to learn and grow. Otherwise the change will roll over us and crush us. We can’t stop the process of change, nor do we need to regard it as a threat. It’s always there and how we respond to it will be key to our survival.

The point of the model is that it is not useful or growthful to concentrate only on one of these aspects: they all need to be activated and acted on all the time, they are not separate entities. We cannot concentrate on learning, for example, and neglect the body, because the body will wither and become less effective as the vehicle for our learning.

As the authors warn in the book: “We think of ‘balance’ as running from one area to another fast enough to spend time in each one on a regular basis. But the ‘touching base’ paradigm ignores the reality of their powerful synergy. It’s where these four needs overlap that we find true inner balance, deep fulfillment, and joy”

So how do we achieve this kind of balance in our lives? This is, of course, the difficult part, the part where the hard work comes in.

Let’s start with the body. What do I have to do, each moment of each day, to make sure that my body is functioning optimally?

The obvious things are adequate exercise and adequate rest. Naturally nutrition is also important. Seeing to it that my body gets enough of what is good for it – eating a healthy, balanced diet is essential for the continued well-being not only of the body, but of the mind and spirit as well. There are countless books on the market about diet and the connection between diet and health, and these can be very useful. I think that common sense will show that a few very simple ideas about diet are quite sufficient to keep the body in optimal condition, when allied with adequate exercise and adequate rest: reduce fats, salt and sugar, don’t eat too much red meat, do eat fruit and vegetables (as much as possible uncooked), whole grains and pulses. As much as possible eat food sourced in or near where you live which is preferably grown organically. The body, as Jesus said, is the “temple of the Holy Spirit” and it should not be defiled with lots of artificial stuff.

The body also suffers when exposed to too many stressful situations, and that means, in my view at least, that exercise should not, at least for us in daily life who are not sports people, gentle yet aerobic, like a good brisk walk at least five times a week. Walking is naturally calming and opens the mind as well as keeping the body functioning well. When your life seems to be getting too hectic and stressed, take a walk. When you have a problem that seems insoluble, take a hike! The mind works best when aerated, so take a walk to get the lungs full of air. Walking is also cheap – you don’t need a whole lot of apparatus or special clothes, just what you normally wear.

We are learning creatures. From the moment of birth, and even before birth, we learn. We only stop learning when we die, and some would say, not even then. I believe that to stop learning is to die. If we start to see every situation we are in as a learning opportunity we can change the way we see the world. And then there are some special things we can do to add to the learning. These are, in no particular order, reading, visualizing, planning and writing.

Reading

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.” – Charles W. Eliot, who was president of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909, the longest term in the University’s history.

Reading books is a wonderful way of opening ourselves to the lives, ideas, thoughts and experiences of others. Reading opens the mind and stimulates thinking, even if you are just reading a light novel for relaxation, that novel is made up of words which the author has strung together in a particular way that arises out of her own experience and learning, and so we touch her spirit through her words. Reading any writings of the great spiritual masters opens our minds to their insights. It doesn’t matter too much what you read, Zane Gray or Plato, Mills and Boone or Camus, there is something to learn, something to let you encounter another person who you could not encounter physically, and that is a huge opportunity. I am not saying that all writings are equal, though. There of course are texts that are deeper and more challenging, what I am saying is that any reading is better than no reading, and usually people who start reading the lighter stuff, if they want to grow will naturally start to move on to deeper stuff. It’s how you approach the reading that is important also. Just a moment’s thought about the book in your hands can be a revelation of deeper worlds – how is it we can read the words, how did the writer know that to put this thought in this way would be so meaningful to me? Isn’t it amazing that for the expenditure of relatively small amount of money I can get in touch with the thoughts and feelings of someone who lives very far from me in both time and space? A book, even a Mills and Boone, is a small miracle of communication.

However, there is a limit even to books. “Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life,” said writer Robert Louis Stevenson, who left the world a goodly number of books himself.

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” – Sir Richard Steele, founder of the magazine The Tatler in 1709 and of the magazine The Spectator two years later.

Visualising

“Creative visualization is the technique of using your imagination to create what you want in your life.” – Shakti Gawain, in her book Creative Visualization.

Much has been written in recent years about the Law of Attraction, and I have to admit here to a certain degree of skepticism about it, simply because the Law of Attraction people seem to see it only as a way to attract wealth. Maybe I’m being simplistic about that but that’s how it comes across very often. I think that creative visualization is a deeper process of really opening your mind, your imagination, to what is possible, and what is possible is almost infinite. If, after sincerely looking at all the possibilities revealed through your studying and meditating (which we will explore in the next section) you decide that you really want to be fabulously wealthy, that’s OK, but not necessarily the end of the story.

The key to visualisation’s power and place in learning is the imagination. One of the benefits of reading is that it stimulates the imagination. As Napoleon said, “The human race is governed by its imagination.” Visualisation enables a person to unlock that power, to start to see what no-one else has ever seen, to go where no-one else has ever gone. Anatole France, great French writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921, said, “To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.” He also said, “To accomplish great things, we must dream as well as act.” The key in that quotation is that accomplishment requires both dreaming and acting – just dreaming alone will not do it. And acting without dreaming will tend to be empty, as Macbeth said:

“...a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.” (Shakespeare: The Tragedy of Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 5)

And such action will end up in the sorry state that Macbeth himself did, as he said later in the same scene:

“I gin to be aweary of the sun, And wish the estate o' the world were now undone.”

Covey, in the Seven Habits, puts it as the second of the seven habits: “Begin with the end in mind.” In order to find the “end” which one seeks, he proposes a visualisation exercise: imagine you are attending your own funeral and listening to four eulogists, one from your family, one from your friends, one from your work or profession and one from your community. What would you want each one of them to be saying about you? These things represent the “end” for you, the purpose of your life and acting. If you get clarity about this through visualisation, and then act upon it, your life will not be like that “tale told by an idiot.”

Planning

“I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.” – E.B. White, author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little.

If we want to get “there” from “here” we need to plan, and planning is a mental exercise, an imaginative exercise. We plan, then circumstances change and make our plans useless, or at least of lesser value than we thought they had, and then we have to learn from that and plan again. As Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” In other word, the mental effort and discipline involved in the planning process is essential if we are to learn from mistakes and problems.

Planning is at least partly a process of sifting through the possibilities and making choices, as E.B. White hinted at in the quotation above. Covey and his co-authors in First Things First propose what they call the “Time Management Matrix.” In this matrix there are four quadrants determined by the four factors: what is important, what is not important, what is urgent and what is not urgent. Importance is determined by whether an activity “will contribute to our overall objectives and give richness and meaning to Life” or not. Urgency is determined by whether or not there is a deadline approaching before which the activity must be completed. They point out also that often urgency and busyness can be an addiction. We get addicted to the adrenalin rush of dealing with crises, and even get a high from being seen as the “fixer”, the one who sorts things out, the knight in shining armour who rescues the beautiful damsel from the jaws of the fire-breathing dragon.

But often dealing with crises detracts us from focussing on what is really important. We spend so much time fighting the fires of crisis that we neglect the really important things in our lives, those things that, if we did pay attention to them, would give us the most satisfaction, provide the most meaning and fulfilment. These are the things that are not urgent but very important, the things that contribute to the “end” which we should always keep in mind.

As Lester R. Bittel, author of What Every Supervisor Should Know (1968), said: “Good plans shape good decisions. That's why good planning helps to make elusive dreams come true.”

Writing

“An artist exudes vitality; a spiritual person exudes peace. But, says Katagiri, behind the peace of the spiritual person is tremendous liveliness and spontaneity.” From Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg (1986).

Writing is a great way to learn about yourself and others. Whatever form your writing takes it will reflect your experiences, your thoughts, your heart. As Christina Baldwin states, “Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.”

“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair; the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.” - Stephen King (1947 - ), On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 2000.

Like reading, writing is a great way to exercise your mind. It is a way to link and clarify thoughts and feelings but must be approached seriously, as King observed. Or as Erica Jong (The Fear of Flying) noted: “Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that talent to the dark place where it leads.”

Writing is a creative way to personal growth.

I’m writing this in Pretoria, South Africa, as summer is slowly giving way to autumn and a gentle rain intermittently falls onto the already wet grass and bends the leaves of the monstera deliciosa down until they touch the grass, and I think of getting my daughter Caitlin ready for school this morning (she has just started Grade 1) and then taking her to the school. When I dropped her there this morning I stood and watched her, unseen by her, as she walked slowly towards the other children in the playground, a little hesitant, a little shy, with the long blonde plait I had made in her hair hanging down her back and her school shorts almost covering her dainty little knees, and I wondered about how she experiences school – is it an adventure? Is she fearful of what is going to happen today at school? She seems so delicate, so vulnerable, it hurts to leave her there. And yet I know that as the seasons come and go, she is carrying the next stage of humanity in her small body, she is the rain coming down on the next generation, while I am approaching my autumn and I cannot be there for her always. I have to let go. And that is what comes out in my writing and I’m glad to be writing this in an article about personal growth. And I’m learning something about myself and about my daughter as I write. And it’s painful and beautiful at the same time. So is growth.

“To love is the greatest thing in life; it is very important to talk about love, to feel it, to nourish it, to treasure it, otherwise it will soon be dissipated, for the world is very brutal. If while you are young you don't feel love, if you don't look with love at people, at animals, at flowers, when you grow up you find that your life is empty; you will be very lonely, and the dark shadows of fear will follow you always. But the moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed.” - Yogananda

If you have no sympathy for the troubles of others

You are not worthy to be called by the name of "man." – Sa’di

This is the area of the heart, of love. To find fulfilment in this area takes service, empathy and synergy. This is the more public area of our journey of personal growth, this is where we come into direct and immediate contact with our fellows – lovers, children, co-workers and others. In South Africa we have a saying in the Nguni languages (one of the groups of Bantu languages spoken in most of sub-Saharan Africa, a group including isiXhosa, isiZulu, Siswati): umntu ngumuntu ngabantu – a person is a person through other people. We cannot be a person in isolation. Our humanness is dependent on our contact and interaction with others. This is the essence of the African philosophy of Ubuntu, sometimes called African Humanism.

Key aspects of this area are service, empathy and synergy.

Service

“Everything we do, even sleeping in our bedroom alone with the lights off, affects the whole universe. When we really see this, our whole life has to change. To realize who or what we are is to realize that we are this One Body. The moment we realize this, everything in the One Body is realized. Then we see how much there is to do because our perspective, initially restricted to the self, is now unrestricted.” - from Bernie Glassman, Infinite Circle, Teachings in Zen (2002).

Perhaps it is in the light of this oneness of everything that we can understand one of the difficult sayings of Jesus: “Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors; only so can you be children of your heavenly Father, who makes his sun to rise on good and bad alike, and sends the rain on the honest and the dishonest. If you love only those who love you, what reward can you expect?” – Jesus in Matthew 5: 44 – 46 (NEB).

Of course it is easy to say “love your enemies” but how does one love, never mind your enemies – even those close to you? I think that love is expressed in many different ways, and the ways I want to discuss in the context of personal growth are empathy and synergy. Empathy and synergy are two ways of serving our fellows – two ways of fulfilling the Zen Bodhisattva Precepts, especially the Three Pure Precepts: cease from evil, do good and do good for others.

A personal parenthetic interlude:

I receive daily a “Note from the Universe” in my e-mail, an often light-hearted but usually quite apt small paragraph. As I was typing this section this morning one came in, and I reproduce it here unedited, just for fun!

Did you know, Tony, that whenever you feel
love, you literally begin to glow? You probably did.

But did you know that the glowing is actually made up of
zillions of minute sparkles? And that these sparkles receive as much energy as
they create? And that because of this energy exchange you completely stop aging
and look younger? Abundance is immediately drawn to you? Healing powers fill
you? Muscles are strengthened, pounds are shed, and your vision improves?
Lingering questions are answered? New friends are summoned? Old friends are
poked? Problems are solved? And maple syrup tastes more maple-y? 

All when you feel love. 

It's
true – 

The
Universe

And you didn’t believe in synchronicity?

A story from Bernie Glassman’s book Infinite Circle:

A Chinese poet once asked a Zen teacher, “What is the most important thing in Buddhism?” The teacher replied, “Cease from evil and do good.” The poet said, “Even a three-year-old child can repeat those words.” The teacher replied, “Yes, even a three-year-old child can repeat those words; but an eighty-year-old person still finds it hard to do what they say.”

Empathy

Empathy is a value stance, a way of being and communicating in the world in relation to others. It is the readiness to see the world or any situation from another person’s point of view. In Covey’s Seven Habits book it is called Habit 5: seek first to understand, then to be understood. Covey states that “Communication is the most important skill in life.” And how we communicate is critical to our growth as people.

Empathy was defined by renowned psychologist Heinz Kohut as "the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person.” So it is an effort of the imagination.

Making the effort to understand the other before insisting on being understood ourselves is the key. Covey again: “We’re filled with our own rightness, our own autobiography. We want to be understood. Our conversations become collective monologues.”

To let go of our rightness is a risky, difficult thing to do. Not taking the risk is adding another risk – the risk that we will not grow, will not reach our full potential, will not become who we would like, in our deepest being, to be. To let go of our rightness is to risk that the other person might be right, and very often we don’t want to take that risk, because we are so invested in our own rightness.

Another risk of empathy is that we might be changed by the experience and not be the person we thought we were any more. This can be a very scary thought.

Empathy involves a deep listening to the other person, a listening for their meaning, their understanding of what is going on. It means allowing our view of reality to be challenged so that we stop shouting at each other across barricades and really start to listen for understanding. No easy task.

Synergy

“Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.” – the Mahatma Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

This is Covey’s Habit 6. Synergy is defined in Wikipedia as “the term used to describe a situation where the final outcome of a system is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Part of the excitement and energy of synergy comes from the interaction and interplay between differences. “And the key to valuing those differences,” writes Covey, “is to realize that all people see the world, not as it is, but as they are.”

This valuing of differences and acting on the differences means that a third way has to be found – not “my” way or “your” way but “our” way. It means that the relationships between people are more important than their views on issues. That respect for others is a key value. This is Ubuntu again – I am because you are.

“Personal leadership is the process of keeping your vision and values before you and aligning your life to be congruent with them.” – Stephen Covey, American leadership consultant and writer

“Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.” – Albert Einstein 1879-1955, German-born brilliant American theoretical physicist

What do we want to leave our children and their children? What would we like them to think of us after we have gone? We are back to those questions again. Of course, each person has to answer these questions for themselves. I’m suggesting that it takes courage and insight into oneself to answer the questions with honesty and meaning. How to get such insight and honesty will be up to each individual and I think that there are three things that can help in this regard: values clarification, study and meditation.

Values Clarification

All our behaviour is driven by our values. From moment to moment life calls on us to make choices, and we make these choices on the basis of what we value, what things we hold dear, what we regard as truly important in our lives. When we choose to do “this” instead of “that,” it’s because we think “this” will be more in tune with what we value than “that” would.

The value of values clarification is that we begin to understand what we value and can start to make choices about our values, instead of our values being just accepted from outside sources – our parents, our peers, society at large. This is the difference between chosen values and introjected values. A person who lives by chosen values is likely to be more fulfilled than one who lives by introjected values. Living by introjected values often means going along to get along – just following the herd. The problem with this is that the herd will often take you to a place where you suddenly discover you don’t want to be, but now it’s too late to escape.

This is not to say that “anything goes,” however. As in all areas of human life, there are limits to the individual’s freedom – my freedom, in a sense, ends where it comes into contact with your freedom. We find ourselves most alive, most fulfilled, in relation to other people, not in some solipsistic place where only what we want is real. Such a place would turn out to be a dry and dusty desert, where we would eventually long for the refreshment of human contact – real, intimate contact. So we have to negotiate the limits our freedoms together, to come to agreement about the limits, without giving up what is right for us individually. A tough process, but one which will give meaning and excitement to life.

The importance of choice is highlighted by Covey as Habit 1: Be proactive. He cites the discovery of Victor Frankl that between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose: “Within the freedom to choose are those endowments that make us uniquely human.” These endowments, according to Covey, are self-awareness, imagination, conscience and independent will. “Between stimulus and response is our greatest power – the freedom to choose.” Says Covey.

Carl Rogers, the great humanistic psychologist, put is this way: “Man has within him an organismic basis for valuing. To the extent that he can be freely in touch with this valuing process in himself, he will behave in ways which are self-enhancing.”

And later in the same article, he states: “... such openness to experience leads to emerging value directions with appear to be common across individuals and perhaps even across cultures. ...individuals who are thus in touch with their experiencing come to value such directions as sincerity, independence, self-direction, self-knowledge, social responsivity, social responsibility, and loving interpersonal relationships.”

Study

By study I am not meaning only the common meaning of studying for an academic or technical qualification, important as those are. By study I mean getting deeper into anything that interests you – if you hear a piece of music that grabs you, find out who wrote it and what the circumstances were that led to it. If you enjoy a particular book, find out about the author, not just what other books he or she might have written, but where and how did they live, what were their interests. In other words, don’t just accept everything at face value but try to get underneath the surface.

I am often amazed when I find a person loves a particular piece of music but knows nothing more about it. Digging beneath the surface can enrich your mind and lead to ever greater understanding. An example – while writing this piece I came across the quotation on planning by E.B. White which I really enjoyed. I wanted to know more about him so did the obvious – I Googled his name and came up with the fact that he had written the books Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little. Now my daughter has long been fascinated by the movies of these books but I had not realised that they were based on books by the same author. Now I am enjoying other writings by him.

Study is being open to experience and looking deeper into it. Being ready to explore wherever life leads. Being humble in the face of experience, not being dogmatic or looking for answers, but being ready to enjoy the process of learning. Answers tend to close down enquiry – living in the process opens up possibilities that you cannot imagine when looking for answers.

Meditation

“Meditation, through its ability to help us navigate the mind, restores that ability of inner listening, allowing us to make the best choices.” – Joan Borysenko, author of Minding the Body, Mending the Mind (1987).

One of the greatest ways to get to know yourself and how your mind works is to meditate. Meditation also has benefits in physical and spiritual states. Some of the benefits of regular meditation are stress reduction, strengthening of the body's immune system, better organized thought processes, improved powers of concentration, enhanced powers of memory, refinement and enlivening of the nervous system, awakening of regenerative energies, slowing of biologic aging processes, development of the capacities of the brain to process perceptions and states of consciousness, and orderly functioning of the body's organs, glands, and systems, according to the Centre for Spiritual Awareness, a Centre established by a Yogananda follower Roy Eugene Davis.

I was first alerted to the benefits of meditation by reading the book by Joan Borysenko, Minding the Body, Mending the Mind back in 1991 and I have been learning more about it ever since.

Personal growth is all about change, development and the process of becoming what Soren Kiekegaard called “the fully functioning person.” It’s a journey, a process that will continue from birth to death, with many ups and downs. The important thing is to stay open to the process and have trust that wherever it leads it will be worthwhile.

As Winston Churchill said: "For myself I am an optimist - it does not seem to be much use to be anything else."

And he also said: "A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."

Once on the road to growth towards our full potential it’s the journey itself that is the point, not the destination.

A final quote from Joan Borysenko: “Committed people who believe they are in control and expect life to be continuously in creative flux are likely to react to stressful events by increasing their interaction with them—exploring, engaging with and learning from them.”