Stop Trying to Fix Yourself
Learn the Trap of Personal Development & Fix this Instead
Personal development is a trap.
There, I said it.
I’m sure you’ve been on this trip for a while. Trying to improve yourself, get better, grow, heal, and maybe even evolve.
But here’s a secret that I learned the hard, slow way:
You can’t rush your evolution and no amount of forcing yourself to grow into someone you’re not ready to become is effective — or lasting.
Any change that comes too quickly may not be sustainable. Maybe you’re focusing on changing quirks in your personality, bad habits, or even patterns that have become a part of you — at this moment — in your current reality.
And that’s ok. But it’s not the end game.
My mentor always scoffed at the term “personal development.” He said that what it meant was “developing a persona.”
Maybe you decided the old persona or personality wasn’t cutting it. You dove deep into self-help books, videos, and training to become the new you.
But has it worked?
Personal Development’s Little-Known Secret
There’s a little secret in the personal development world that most won’t talk about. Let’s call it the rubber band effect. This suggests that you can stretch yourself to the limits and push yourself to change — and maybe even attain some results for a short time.
But the identity — the person you know yourself to be — must change at the most fundamental level for it to be permanent and lasting. It’s not the habits, behaviors, or even the characteristics you add to your personality, but what you subtract that brings you home.
There is a true you that will emerge in its own right timing when everything else falls away. Life has a way of presenting us with the circumstances we need to become our authentic selves. It has a knack for revealing where we are out of alignment even with what we say we want.
What you think you want and what your heart truly wants might be two very separate things.
“The end product of spirituality is that we end up becoming who we were before we became spiritual.” -Stuart Mooney
When we take on a spiritual ego that we’ve created to replace our regular ego identity, we may feel blessed or endowed with new powers, gifts, or talents that we didn’t have — or weren’t aware of — before.
This can feel good on many levels and enhance our self-worth through doing or being of service. It can also strengthen our identity as a healer, coach, mystic, or business person. We can go on this next ride of exploring life through the lens of the spiritual ego, looking upon our fellow man as less than if they’re not ‘evolving’ like we are.
But that’s the trap.
Our aim might have started with good intentions to be our best selves. But in the process, if you’ve disregarded the self you were before you became spiritual as if it was some roadblock you had to get past, then you’re missing the bigger point.
Spiritual teacher Robert Gonzales once said:
“Resistance is the root cause of all suffering.”
When I heard that quote, I sat with it for some time. It begs the question:
What are we resisting?
I think it’s becoming our true self.
Divinity is Simplicity
The Kundalini Yoga tradition uses the mantra Sat Nam, meaning True Name or True Identity. This mantra leads us back to simplicity — becoming who we are, rather than attempting to evolve out of the stages life deliberately places us on.
Divinity is simplicity, as my spiritual teacher used to say.
It ought to be simple to discover who we are. It’s a shedding of who we are not. It’s a remembering of our innocent nature and the goodness in our hearts that we were born with.
The Sufis say that the dysfunctional personality is the gateway to the soul.
This ought to be comforting to the seeker. It suggests that we can’t get it wrong. Your flaws always lead to perfection. Your mistakes help you fall forward into your true divine nature. The bumps and bruises along the way simply soften your hard shell to be able to surrender when it’s time to fully release the old identity and take on your true name or true identity.
I spent years in a coaching identity guiding people on their spiritual path through their emotional turmoil & psychological conditions. After many successful client stories and a few horrifying ones, I realized that the word coach is a misnomer. Teacher or guide, yes. Coach, no.
One can teach another about the path and the pitfalls they may encounter. But the other person must find their way, discover their truth, and develop an inner resolve to deal with the trials and tribulations of life.
That person inevitably becomes who they are — in the most natural sense. Conversely, the same person can allow life to shatter their resolve and choose to give up rather than give in. There is a difference.
You’re only a failure when you stop trying, I once heard.
Finding our unique creative expression is part of the ‘healing’ path.
It’s not only healing our trauma, our afflictions, and addictions, that make us whole. It’s bringing forth what’s inside of us that is meant to be shared.
When I decided to devote more time to writing and less time to coaching others, it freed up and gave life to a huge amount of energy inside me. Unexpressed, this energy ate away at me and caused me huge amounts of misery.
I was resisting becoming who I am. I chose not to see this until it was painfully obvious. Life taught me about my path by showing me what was no longer in alignment. The more discomfort I felt, the more I knew I was resisting life’s guidance.
If I had built up a huge coaching practice without finding my expression through writing, dance, and using my voice, I don’t think I would have ever been truly satisfied.
I was convinced that serving others meant coaching others. Now I’m convinced that teaching from experience is what I’m here to do.
Writing satisfies me. If I do more of that I know I’m becoming my true identity, rather than fabricating a spiritual identity — a role in the community — that may or may not be true for me.
The Game of Surrender
Surrender is the name of the game, as Reverend Michael Beckwith once said.
So what are we surrendering?
It’s obvious to me after some time contemplating this and experiencing the different roles I’ve played, that seeking is about remembering and coming back to our true selves.
A good teacher, in my experience, asks good questions.
So let me close with these inquiries:
What is the one thing you’ve been putting off doing despite strong calls to give this more attention?
What is the root of your resistance to it?
What do you fear becoming if you allow your expression?
What effort are you putting into creating more of what you love?
What’s in the way of that?
Lastly, who are you being while you’re engaged in this process?
This takes work. Sit with these questions a bit.
The Antithesis of Personal Development
When you truly like the person you are, accepting your perceived flaws, loving your inconsistencies, and embrace the scrapes and falls that life constantly supplies, you will begin to relax into the surrendered version of yourself.
It’s almost the antithesis of personal development work. Instead of trying to become more, you surrender to what you are at the core. You make yourself more pliable, more able to receive what spirit wants to express through to you.
No effort, just allowing. No forcing, just receiving. And not just idly being, but taking action when you receive inspiration so that you can transform into your true self.
This is how you become. Step by step. Listening. Choosing. Adapting. Evolving. Following a divine timeline that you may not — and may never be — privy to.
It takes trust. It requires surrender. And that means forgiving yourself for trying to ‘make things happen’ of your own accord and according to the timeline you had imagined for your life.
The great mystery and conundrum of life is that we have the power of choice and yet we are not in full control of how things unfold. You can only take responsibility for how you show up each day and who you’re being in the process.
The rest is about playing the game. And the real winners in this game are not the most competitive, but the ones who cooperate and surrender to the greater forces at work in our lives and destinies.
Our great spiritual work, as I understand it, is to find a synergy amongst ourselves — to live at a creative and cooperative frequency where things flow effortlessly and where we handle interruptions to that flow with grace.
As life changes right before our eyes — whether it’s work, relationships, or physical location — we learn to redirect our energy, flow with the new trajectory, and sometimes shift our priorities.
The only constant is change. Get used to it. But don’t be discouraged by it.
Life is here to teach you and lead you. Resisting it will be your undoing. But maybe that’s what you need.
Either way, you can’t get it wrong.
Life knows what it’s doing even if we don’t.
Thanks for reading! Please clap or comment if it landed for you.
→ For more inspiration, download my free ebook The 8 Passages for Purposeful & Powerful Living
