Personal Growth Planet Blog

Ever feel like you’re spinning your wheels, moving but never quite getting anywhere and especially not getting to where you want to go?

To me, this is the road to nowhere.

Goals are set, plans are made, dreams are dreamt…and yet I seem to stay stuck in the same routine. I don’t appear to be moving anywhere nearer to those aspired places.

Of course, this isn’t entirely true. If I take a step back, I can see that I am actually living the kind of life that I envision. In many ways, it’s exactly the kind of life I have envisioned. I do occasionally reach my goals– especially those “little” ones. But, it doesn’t really feel that way.

February 29th doesn’t come along every year. Somewhere in history, someone decided that there would only be a February 29th approximately every 4 years.

We call the auspicious day in which we have a February 29th, Leap Day.

What a wonderful opportunity!

Marking Leap Day is a perfect time to push ourselves a bit (or a lot).

When I think of taking a leap, the first image that comes into my mind is parachuting. I can see myself leaping confidently out of an airplane, free falling amid the clouds and blue sky and then pulling the cord of my parachute to drift back down to the ground.

“You’re making a mountain out of a molehill!”

You’ve probably heard this adage before, maybe from your grandmother or a great-uncle.

Recently, I found myself essentially saying the same thing to my older son. As I listened to him list off all of the huge and impossible situations in his life, I couldn’t help myself.

I told him that, from my vantage point,- things aren’t as dire as he was making them out to be.

I urged him to stop making problems when there really aren’t any.

Easy for me to say, huh?!

I didn’t plan on purchasing a brand new car at the start of this new year, but this is what has happened. I’m grateful for my well-being after a car wreck that totaled my old car and also for the ability to purchase a new car.

You may have never owned a brand new car, but perhaps you’ve ridden in one. You know that smell? It’s a sort of rubber-fabric-plastic smell that you encounter in a new car (possibly due to some hideous chemicals that, frankly, I don’t want to think about).

The look of determination and focus. The sheer will to get something done…even if it’s something that’s a huge challenge or seemingly impossible.

That is being in “The Zone.”

If you look at the face of a basketball player about to shoot a free throw, you’ll see it.

If you watch a preschooler crossing shoelaces while learning to tie a bow, you’ll see it.

If you get up close to a performer on stage who is singing, dancing, playing a guitar or another instrument, you’ll see it.

You’ll see that person (or those people) in the zone.

You might not think of the culture here in the U.S. as devoid of fun and frivolity, but I think that it is. Look around and you might see all kinds of people doing all kinds of things that seem light and jovial…but, if you look a closer, this isn’t necessarily the case.

You see, there’s a huge difference between truly having fun and merely numbing out through entertainment.

Many of us seem to live in this impossible contradiction of wanting to do something important and valuable with our lives but then craving some outlet or sense of escape.

This is NOT a blog post urging you to dream the impossible dream, fight the unbeatable foe and other such sage advice.

Of course, there’s something inspiring and amazing about a person having a vision for a desired future and, despite huge odds, he or she is able to manifest that dream. It becomes a reality.

Impossible dreams do come true. Your own impossible dreams may very well come true for you.

This is also NOT a blog post that attempts to tell you which of your dreams are possible and which are impossible. Actually, I believe that pretty much anything is possible and that any of us can live the kind of lives we envision for ourselves.

You can ask my kids– I really don’t like clutter. I get all squirrely and irritable when the piles of books, papers, electronics, toys or whatever get too high and are spread too widely throughout the house.

I’ll be the first one to admit that it’s not just their stuff that adds to the feeling I get of being stuffed in to a space with too many things out and about.

When I reach my clutter breaking point, I generally huff around a bit barking out calls for tidiness and picking up after ourselves.

If you were a warrior on a battlefield or even playing chess or another board game, uttering the words “I surrender” would probably not be a desirable thing to do. There is a definite association between surrendering and failure or weakness in predominant understandings of the concept.

Nobody wants to be considered weak or a loser.

In order to allow the kind of life and success that you want, however, surrender may be the key.

When conditions in your body, your relationships, your job, your bank account– your life– start to feel out of control and are not what you had in mind, you may try to force things back into“line.”

By Amy Phillips-Gary

Losing weight and exercising more are two resolutions that just about everybody includes on his or her list of self improvements to make.

And just about everyone (with exceptions of course) somewhere along the line falls short of those goals. Those aspirations usually get swept aside and forgotten– or used as a rationale for self-criticism and beating up on one’s self.

If you’d like to upgrade yourself by making improvements in the ways you eat and/or your physical fitness, setting yourself up to succeed is a vital first step.