Now think about how many of those personal growth lessons really stuck with you and are still with you today.
I’m guessing that the number of personal growth lessons you wanted to apply to your life is a lot bigger than the number of personal growth lessons you actually did apply to your life.
Getting personal growth lessons to stick is a lot harder than learning about them, but there is a way to make it more likely that they will stick.
A lesson from Tal Ben-Shahar
I came across this trick while watching a video of Tal Ben-Shahar lecturing to his positive psychology class at Harvard. Tal tells a story about how at one point he was giving positive psychology talks to various groups across the country and he was curious about how many of the people attending his talks were actually taking the personal growth lessons he was describing and applying them to their lives.
To test this, Tal, being a psychologist, created an experiment. He went back after a few months and talked to people who had attended his talks and he asked them if they had applied any of the personal growth lessons he had talked about.
What he found was that the ones who had gotten the personal growth lessons to stick were the ones who had gone out and made changes in their lives right after the talk.
The people who had the most success changing their lives were the ones who did it right away.
“I’ll do it tomorrow” is the enemy
It turns out that when you hear about some really great personal growth lesson, the quicker you apply the lesson the more likely it is to stick. If you wait even a day, your excitement and your enthusiasm start to fade and it’s not long before that great personal growth lesson is nothing but a distant memory.
So if you want your personal growth lessons to stick don’t put them on the back burner. Don’t tell yourself you’ll do it tomorrow, or you’ll do it when you’re in the right frame of mind, or you’ll do it when it’s more convenient.
Don’t wait, make changes happen now!
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Great pointers there! Getting things done right away is the key to success.