Exercises To Assist In Personal Growth And Development
PURCHASE A SPIRAL NOTEBOOK and take a few moments each day to record your comments to the questions below. When you record in your Personal Growth Journal, go to a quiet place with soft music in the background. This is your time, guard it jealously and allow yourself to expand. You have no limitations.
1. What do you want? Move through any uncomfortable feeling and write down exactly what you want. Be specific. This is the first question in any situation and the basic one in life. Are you willing to have everything you want? This may be one of the most difficult tasks you can initially undertake because many people do not know what they want or how even to identify their wants.
2. Do the following exercises until you feel restored:
3. Write down all failures you have had with a bearing on purposes, goals, wants, dreams, relationships, etc. Select the purposes, goals, wants.
4. Reclaim your dreams. It is never too late to dream. In fact, if you lose the ability to dream, hope is lost. Spend some time alone and think about some of the dreams from your youth. Of course, you will find that many are no longer important to you but there are still some cinders in your spirit waiting to be fueled to a burst of energy. Once you have decided to do this, miraculously, the way will come.
5. Recover your life by recovering your purposes, objectives,intentions, and vision.
6. Identify any events in your life wherein you felt stopped, diminished, or powerless. Did you as a result or incident shut yourself down and decide to be less than you are? Alternatively, did you decide to make others less so they could not overpower you?
7. Look at what it has cost you to shut down and realize the decisions you made as a result or shutting down and their impact on your life.
8. Who stopped you, forced you, or gave you substitutes for what you really wanted? What have you done to get even, shut down, and get what you want?
9. Write down any thoughts, fears, beliefs, and notions that have to do with you and others having exactly what you/they want.
10. Close your eyes and allow yourself to see, sense, feel yourself in your ideal scene. See yourself having what you want in detail. Allow yourself to “mock it up” in your imagination, envisioning your future experience. Make it real! Do this once or twice a day, as wanted.
11. Write down affirmative statements about your having what you want ten times a day for one week. If any doubts, fears, or misgivings come forth from you, simply write them out in the margin of the page. Then write the affirmative statement again and continue. Remember, you are creating a fresh, and these affirmations may be difficult to keep at first, but keep one.
12. Consider a specific conflict that you are presently experiencing. If you could change it, how would you do so? What is keeping you from having it that way?
13. Whom are you being loyal to in denying yourself the life you want? What are you afraid of losing or being neglected by?
14. List ten ways that you hold yourself back by using inner conflicts.
a. How do you control others by holding yourself back?
b. What has it cost you to be at war with yourself?
15. Commit to living as you choose. What does your heart tell you that you want?
16. Whom do you feel failed to help? Name them.
17. Whom do you feel you failed to help? Name them.
18. List everything you feel guilty about (include what you wouldn’t want anyone to know)
19. Next to each guilt item, write down what you really are angry about, and give yourself permission to feel anger. Your feelings are always appropriate. Forgive yourself for all of it.
20. Observe and write down the ways in which you evoke guilt in others, and then tell them so that they are aware of your games and will support you in giving up guilt as a tool of manipulation and domination.
21. Write down your payoffs in using guilt on others as well as yourself. Observe what guilt costs.
22. Describe in writing what your life would be like without guilt. Imagine a guiltless life. Picture it and allow yourself to experience it.
23. Write a description of the way your main relationship appears at this time. Describe the relationship or the lack of one in as much detail as possible.
24. Visualize the male and female relationship as both being you and let this relationship become a dialogue with yourself between your feminine and masculine energies. Have them make an agreement to love and take care of each other.
25. Write down your ideal intimate relationship and include everything you desire this relationship to be. Withhold nothing, tell the truth and express your deepest desires and needs.
26. List ten ways you deny your feminine nature. List ten fears you have about allowing yourself to fully express your feminine nature. Do this exercise for your masculine nature as well.
27. List the names of the men of who caused you fear and intimidation.. List the names of the women whom caused you fear and intimidation. Look to see if you have repressed your own self-expression and how.
28. Find a safe way to express and release your anger and hurt having to do with men and women (see the exercise on assertiveness).
29. List the feminine and masculine qualities that you are now expressing comfortably.
30. What feelings and emotions do you find difficult to pull up out of yourself and express? Give yourself permission to feel and express them more often until it is natural and easy for you.