What are some effective ways to evaluate your personal growth?

The process of evaluating oneself can be narrowed down primarily to retrospection and introspection:

Self-awareness

Honesty with oneself and the ability to face your flaws are major steps towards personal growth. The ability to accurately assess yourself and reflect on yourself comes with time and practice. A person who’s aware of themselves can easily assess changes in themselves. Yet, a helpful tool for the same can be the maintenance of a diary, where you can record your experiences over a period of time and look back to reflect on them.

Goal achievement

If a self-aware person sets attainable, short-spanned goals rather than far-fetched, unattainable goals, then they can efficiently observe their progress by meeting their checkpoints. Rather than being vague, having clarity in what you want can be a major step in acknowledging your personal growth. Each letter in SMART stands for criteria you should have with each goal you set. S: Specific, M: Measurable; A: Attainable, R: Relevant, T: Timely.

Also read: A Comprehensive Guide to Self-Assessment: Unveiling Your Potential

Tracking your progress

According to the aforementioned method of journaling, you can easily track your progress. In addition to this, schedules, planners, and often compliments or remarks from people close to you can be a mark of your progress. However, what you track, plays a crucial role in your growth. Tracking only your successes is futile. Yet, recording your failures, processes, behaviour patterns, emotions, thoughts, and other aspects of what comprise a person’s personality alongside your successes is what will be worth reflecting on.

Following some simple steps like these, one can evaluate their growth in every aspect of their life. Reflecting on oneself and one’s growth is important. However, allowing room for failure and mistakes is the epitome of being realistic while growing.

Also read: Breaking Free from the Fear of Other People’s Opinions (FOPO)

10 Signs that are indicators of personal growth

1. You don’t need others to tell you that you’re doing well.
2. You can say no without feeling bad.
3. You’re more focused on the present moment.
4. You’re not too hard on yourself.
5. You’re not as annoyed with people.
6. You enjoy being alone.
7. You feel happier inside.
8. You don’t have to explain yourself too much.
9. You can handle your emotions better.
10. You don’t need everyone to like you.

What are the hindrances to personal growth?

Inaction (Slow to Start)

Self-doubt is the biggest reason you’re not working on your goals right now. If you don’t try, then you can’t fail. It’s fun to daydream, but when you start thinking about real timelines and concrete steps, the pressure can get overwhelming. You realize you might actually fail. And the doubt creeps in. What were you thinking? Who do you think you are? Get real—you’re making a fool of yourself. You convince yourself (consciously or subconsciously) that it’s better to act like you don’t care than to honestly go after it and fall flat on your face.

The second reason you’re not working on your goals right now is just laziness. Pure and simple. As long as you think of your dreams as coming true “someday,” then there’s no pressure to do anything now. You avoid real timelines and due dates. And you avoid the work and the stress that comes along with it. Your dreams can wait. You’ve got enough going on right now. After all, you’re still young, and you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.

But here’s the scary thing about thinking like that: Talk to someone who’s been at a company for 25 years. Ask them if they ever thought they would spend their whole life there. They will probably tell you they can’t believe it and that it feels like they just joined the company yesterday. That’s what happens. You’d be shocked at how quickly 5 years, 10 years, and 20 years go by while you’re still talking about “someday.” Self-doubt and laziness. Those are the two big hitters that are keeping you from chasing your goals.

So what can you do about it?

1. Remove “someday” from your vocabulary. There are only seven days in a week, and “someday” is not one of them. Don’t expect it to ever show up.
2. Get rid of all your excuses and acknowledge what’s really holding you back. If you’re lazy and you’re scared of failure, then own up to it and address those feelings directly. Otherwise, there will always be excuses. Always.
3. Develop a detailed plan. Do all the hard thinking up front when you’ve got a clear picture of where you want to go. That way, when you get started, you don’t need to keep figuring things out – you just follow the plan.

Impatience (Quick to Quit):

This is the second thing standing between you and your goals. You finally get started after you’ve convinced yourself of how great it will be. And then you walk face-first into reality and start looking for the nearest exit. You shouldn’t be guilty or surprised about it. The world has become so fast-paced in the past half-century. Why would you be patient if you don’t have to wait for anything anymore?

People used to read newspapers cover-to-cover and write letters to the editor. Now you absorb bite-sized headlines, maybe tap on a little heart, and then move on. People used to get information from books. If it’s not on the first page of your Google search, then it’s not even worth knowing.

You don’t even need to get out of bed to shop anymore. And on top of the light-speed pace you’ve gotten used to, you’ve got an infinity of distractions to keep your mind occupied. Between your socials, your group chats, and your news feeds, if you go five minutes without a notification, you start wondering if your phone has died.

You’re a kid in a candy shop where all the candy is free. Instead of munching on M&Ms, you should stay there and do push-ups, and then walk past all those treats to go find a nutritious meal. Repeat that again and again and again. I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me to go to hell and to take my useless advice with me. I wouldn’t be offended. But it would hurt a little bit because I really empathize with you. I’m in that same candy shop. I’m doing my push-ups (sometimes my hand picks candy too), and I’m keeping my eyes glued to the floor every time I walk past those Reece peanut butter cups. Because I know my weaknesses and how hard it is to overcome them.

Want to overcome?

But I really hope you can overcome yours. I hope you get some value from reading this, and I hope you become someone you can be proud of. I’m writing this as a reminder to myself as much as a reminder for you, so I don’t really care if you upvote or follow. But it would mean the world to me if I was able to write something that made your life just a little bit better. So many people are struggling right now because they have no support and no encouragement. If someone just believed in them, they would do some really amazing things. I know I’m just another online writer, but I remember how much my life changed when someone finally believed in me.

So what’s my advice for how to get past your impatience and avoid quitting? Believe in yourself, because I believe in you. I know that if you persevere and refuse to quit, you’ll realize that anything is possible. You’ll be shocked at what you can do. So think big and don’t stop.

Read Further:

The Success Principles by Jack Canfield 

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho 

Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins