5 Signs You Are Self-Deceiving In Self-Development - Self-development

Self-study and self-development have long become not so much a fashionable hobby as a familiar part of everyday life. However, the current trend is fraught with danger: instead of real competencies, we risk getting only an illusion that will burst like a soap bubble over time. How do you recognize this? How to understand that you are engaged in self-deception in self-development?

The phrase from "Alice Through the Looking Glass" by Lewis Carroll: "You need to run as fast just to stay in place, but to get somewhere, you must run at least twice as fast!" - has long become the rule of our life. Technologies, values, opportunities are changing rapidly, which means that the knowledge and competencies obtained several years ago are hopelessly outdated. You have to constantly keep yourself in shape - not only physical, but also intellectual, updating knowledge in various fields - from psychology to pharmaceuticals, from cultural studies to robotics.

Help or deception?

The educational services market immediately responded to the increased demand. Video bloggers, business coaches and experts of all stripes are constantly competing for our attention. We are offered more and more “useful” content: we are invited to free webinars, where they will offer to get even more information - now, of course, for money; advertise all kinds of popular science books and magazines; promise to make us ideal parents or successful entrepreneurs in just five lessons - and much, much more.

This situation inevitably leads to the fact that, along with really high-quality information products, a lot of "dummies" appear in off- and online spaces: books, courses and trainings, the main purpose of which is to simply siphon money from listeners or readers. What are the signs that show you are falling for their bait?

1. You have become an "eternal student"

If you are constantly “wandering” from training to training, from webinar to webinar, it may be worth stopping and thinking: what caused such an activity? Do you really need continuous training in your chosen field, or is it a way to cover completely different needs - for example, to calm the "impostor syndrome"? Or did you just fall for the bait of marketers who end any master class with a promise to show all the professional secrets … in the next master class?

2. Your costs for self-development are noticeably higher than the resources extracted from it

Calculate the benefits you derive from training courses and compare them with the effort, time and money spent - are they paying off? It does not have to be about material reward, especially when it comes to a hobby - sometimes investments are "fought back" by the pleasure of classes or their own success. However, if for the sake of self-study you have to reduce the quality of your own life: for example, cut down on the usual expenses to pay for your studies, or constantly force yourself to go to the next lesson, is your development really worth these sacrifices, or is this a classic example of a "suitcase without a handle" hard to carry, but also a pity to throw it away?

3. You feel guilty about wasted time

An important marker of an unhealthy attitude towards self-development is the feeling that the time you spend on rest is wasting: there are so many things that have not been studied yet! Modern culture is permeated with the idea of an obligatory "race of achievements", and the educational services market actively supports this discourse, reproaching potential clients for not wasting their time efficiently. If this idea is so ingrained in your consciousness that any unproductive time is perceived with a sense of shame, then the attitude towards self-development should be urgently reconsidered.

4. Because of self-development, your social connections suffer

"Drama club, a circle based on photos, and I also want to sing!" - and now in your busy schedule there is no time left for meetings with friends and family Sunday dinners. Or maybe, on the contrary: are you so passionate about an idea gleaned in a blog or at a seminar that you wholeheartedly try to open the eyes of everyone around you how best to arrange their lives? The consequence of these seemingly dissimilar phenomena is one thing: your social circle is gradually thinning - which means that your self-development, paradoxically, leads to social and, most likely, personal regression.

5. You are sure that everything in life depends only on you

Quite a popular idea that helps to sell more and more trainings and guides: "You yourself attract success or failure into your life!" This delusion is extremely attractive: after all, it is worth learning to think and act "correctly" - and life will immediately turn into the embodiment of dreams. Meanwhile, the unwillingness to meet your own limitations, and in some places even powerlessness, is a clear sign that your self-development has been gradually replaced by an illusion.

And finally, the most important thing: in the pursuit of new competencies, it is important to remember that development is only productive when it comes from an inner motivation

This means that, first of all, you should ask yourself the question: what exactly do I want here and now? Maybe I need to eat and sleep now, and not prepare my homework for the next course? Perhaps it is important for me to take a break to listen to myself and separate the desires imposed on me from my personal ones? Or maybe I don't have the resources for development at all, and for a start it is important to stabilize my life?

After all, our inalienable right is to be honest with ourselves. And this, although difficult, but still the most reliable way to real development.