Time starved personal development

Personal development is time consuming. Reading at least a book each week, changing habits and conditioning your mind and body definitely take a lot of time. These investments are necessary to create the long-term growth and improvement you seek.

But just as it is easy for Warren Buffet to tell you to start investing your money, for someone who has very little time and energy currently, following the personal development advice of someone who has achieved a high degree of energy and time management control can seem overwhelming.

Recently I received a message from a reader who asked how she could focus on personal development while being starved for time. This woman was working full time and had a newborn child. She noted that she liked many of the articles and ideas I had written about but felt that many of my suggestions were simply too time consuming for her to pursue.

She asked me what thoughts I could offer for personal development for someone starved for time. I think this is an issue that plagues many people, so I'd like to share my thoughts on how someone can pursue personal development when they are starved for time.

Most of us tell ourselves the time lie every day. This lie has become so ingrained into our language, conversations and thinking that many people now believe it is a factual truth rather than a complete falsity.

People make use of this lie so much that they seem taken aback and even offended when you point out that it is incorrect. The lie is fairly simple. It is the lie that says we do not have enough time.

How can you possibly have more or less time? Every single person on this planet has twenty four hours in every day, seven days in a week and 365 day each year, except for a bonus at the end of every fourth February. The use of this time lie is so prolific in our society that we use it without notice. Time is a constant.

You can't have any more or less than anyone else. In this sense we really are all created as equals.

When you say you don't have enough time you really mean that it isn't important or urgent enough to you. The reason you don't pursue personal development has nothing to do with some bizarre construct of the space-time continuum that prevents you from having the same amount of time as anyone else. It has to do with your priorities. If something feels both urgent and important to you, you will do it.

This may seem like a simple language change, but it is far more than that. In many cases your assessment of, "I don't have enough time," will indicate that it isn't important enough to you.

But often the time lie is used as an excuse to cover up our own fears, weaknesses or deceits that keep us from seeing the truth. In many cases, we say we don't have enough time when we are really afraid or insecure. Stop using the time lie so you can start to see the truth.

I am not trying to sound condescending in my statement of the time lie. In many cases most of our time is focused on survival. If supporting your family to provide basic necessities is using up most of your time, then that is more important than personal development.

If we look at Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs we can see that survival needs like shelter and food must come before the highest need of self-actualization (or personal growth).

Source: www.scotthyoung.com