While the pursuit of personal excellence is definitely worthwhile there are a number of key elements that need to be considered in any personal development work.

In of themselves these mistakes may not seem like much but they can lead to frustration and lack of results that can undermine your confidence and belief in yourself particularly if you're just starting out on your personal development journey.

Here are some of the most common mistakes that people can make in their quest for personal development success.

1)Judging yourself as a failure based on past results.

This is a biggie. If you start with the mindset that you are a failure then you set yourself up for more of the same. Identifying yourself as a failure sends a very powerful command to the subconscious to go and look for proof to confirm this belief.

Far better is to adopt the idea that what has happened has happened and that rather than looking at past experiences or worse yourself as a failure you can simply evaluate the results you achieved and take the learning which you have gained from the experience with you and move on.

2)Comparing yourself to others.

Personal development is really an inner game and as the term implies personal. Comparing your results with those of others around you can often lead to frustration and resentment if they're doing better than you and the just as destructive negative feelings of inappropriate pride and smugness if you're doing better than them.

Everyone is on their own individual personal development journey whether they are aware of it or not and as such everyone is doing the best they can with what they have and that should be acknowledged at some level. By giving others the benefit of the doubt and accepting that they're doing the best they can you free yourself of the negativity that comes from comparing yourself to others. As you give them the benefit of the doubt you also give it to yourself.

The best course of action is to simply observe what's going on around you and when you encounter others being successful adopt the mindset that success is good and that if they can achieve success I can achieve success. Any time there is negative emotion associated with the success you see in others it sends a very powerful message to the subconscious that success is not good.... success feels bad.

With this mindset do you think success is more or less likely to occur for you?

3)Expecting others to help you in your personal development journey.

Clearly we aren't all necessarily on the same page when it comes to what we want from ourself and our life. Expecting those around you, workmates, family, friends and society at large for that matter to support you in your personal development journey, is once again setting yourself up for frustration and disappointment.

Part of the price you pay for the reward that you get when you develop your self and grow is the need to be a self starter. You have to initiate your own personal development and continue to keep the fire burning sometimes on your own and seemingly without any external support.

This is not to say that you won't gather supporters who have a dream just like yours and who can help you just as you can help them. It's just that you can't expect that support or force that support from others. Personal development is about the buck stopping with each of us.

4) Judging failure and success in all or nothing terms.

This is a huge mistake and one that will prove to be a huge obstacle in your personal development journey if you don't come to terms with it.

What you must always keep in mind is that personal development is a process. In other words there is really no beginning or end but rather a continuum of ongoing reference points. On this continuum success and failure are always relative. Some points in time would rightly be considered successful while others would be less so. But at no point are we absolute failures or absolute successes.

Thinking this way you can see that there is no real failure or success but rather experiences that are more or less to our liking and more or less useful to us as we work towards achieving what we want.

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