It’s time for YOU to claim progress on your personal growth journey!
Claim your success and get ready for some next-level personal growth goals! To check yourself on your progress, go back to some frustrating or annoying situations (or people) from the past. For example, situations where you usually got upset, annoyed, or frustrated (like EVERY time).
Situations, where we have been conditioned to react a certain way are so accessible within us and are so easily triggered.
Now, the test is if you’d handle it differently now than you did in the past.
It’s very common to fall back into a pattern of old behaviors and old thoughts when we put ourselves into situations reminding us about our past.
When you can see that situation (or person) in a different light, from a higher perspective, you can claim your progress!
Need some guidance? Free 30-min session with Ulrika.
Situations from the past are a great starting point to test if you’re ready for new personal growth goals.
No matter how old you get, the old familiar behavioral patterns and familiar ways of handling things are often just bubbling automatically.
Furthermore, as soon as you enter a triggering environment from the past, or enter a situation in which you know the all too familiar outcome, you got a good “personal-growth-testing” situation.
I recently got the opportunity to visit my family in the small town where I grew up in Sweden. Coming back there it felt like time stood still.
Everything brought me back in time.
My parents still live in the house I grew up in and many of my childhood friends still live there, like they always have.
It’s that feeling of being thrown back in time and still being a teenager now living in the same house as your parents, sleeping in the same room as I did as a teenager, eating the same type of breakfast as I did back then.
When you connect back to your roots good behaviors and sometimes not-so-good behaviors come forward.
I’m sure you can relate to some extent to this “time-capsule” feeling that comes forward when you interact with parents, siblings, cousins, or other relatives.
For the longest time through my adult years, I still got annoyed with certain behaviors of my parents or other relatives in a similar way as when I was a teenager.
It was like nothing had changed, time stood still and I felt I’d been tossed back in time every time I visited or talked on the phone.
But a few years ago something happened. I began to observe myself, especially in those situations when I felt upset emotions rise.
Rather than engaging and automatically firing back when I felt triggered about something, I was observing myself and the situation instead.
It was like I was just watching it unfold from the outside.
Once I started to notice that I was able to observe a situation as it happened, it allowed me to choose my reaction in the moment.
Major inner growth!
After that experience, I knew I had to set some new personal growth goals. The ability to observe the situation rather than react automatically was a major sign that I had grown as a person.
So how do YOU know if you need to set new personal growth goals?
Let’s find out!
Here are a few tips you can use next time you get triggered by a familiar situation. The best is to actually BE in the situation, but understandably, that may not be possible all the time.
You can still do this test.
Ask yourself:
- In what situations do your old thought patterns still kick in just like they were back then? Write down one or a few of those in familiar situations.
- How did you feel then? How do you feel now?
2. Do you notice new things that you have never noticed before, despite the familiar situation and people in it?
3. Do you react the same way as you always have? Are your triggers the same? Or no? Why?
If you feel and react exactly the same way as you always have, you still have some work to do.
If you notice a change in how your thoughts, feelings, and actions are showing up. Good job!
The point here is: How can you see these all too familiar situations and familiar people with new eyes and new thoughts? Observe your feelings that come up and decide if you want to keep feeling that way or not.
This personal growth goals test can be done in all sorts of situations, so do this test on multiple situations and see what you find out.
When you grow as a person your triggers will not be the same as before, your reactions to an all-too-familiar conversation that may have triggered you in the past are no longer affecting you in the same way.
You’re changed forever. And it’s time to set some new personal growth goals. (Do you want help with setting personal growth goals? Contact me and let’s chat!)
A major sign that you have grown as a person is that you can feel detached from the conversation that made you blow up in the past. You can now stay calm, and collected and feel your inner strength no matter what happens and who says what. What a relief, but it’s a daily practice.
If you wanted to you could fall into the same pattern as before in a second, but the difference is that in the past you didn’t feel you had a choice, it just bubbled up sometimes to your surprise and you reacted in a millisecond.
Now, you feel like you have a choice.
It’s like you observe what’s happening, that millisecond it takes to notice and make that extra breath and chose a non-reaction. Now you’re not engaging in something that triggered you negatively before.
The most incredible discovery you’ll find in all of this is that you have a choice to send love instead of frustration. That’s the major sign.
When you can stand in your power and extend love within a situation that previously triggered you, that’s HUGE!! It’s a sign of personal growth.
If you feel this increased self-awareness in your everyday life it’s a sign of progress in life.
Through self-awareness, you become conscious about yourself, others, and the unlimited possibilities that are available to you.
Applying self-awareness in every single situation and you gain your power back. The power in making a choice on how to react.
React in a new way.
What I’m talking about here is not just making a different choice as black and white. Self-awareness comes with new feelings and actions for you to consider within that same familiar situation that may have never crossed your mind before.
Change the energy of a situation and therefore the outcome.
Wow! Talk about personal expansion and is ready for some new personal growth goals!
Next, bring yourself back to the situation and consider the opportunity for forgiveness. Forgiveness is always available to you.
You may never have believed that forgiveness would be available to you in a particular situation, because of past frustrations that seem to always show up in thought or in person.
But right now it’s available. No matter how bad the situation is.
Forgiveness is love. It’s both self-love and love for others.
Forgiveness is primarily an act of self-love because what’s happening is that you’re really forgiving yourself first. You’re forgiving yourself for the way you may have acted or reacted in the all-to-familiar situations that triggered you up until this point.
Behaviors and thoughts are as deep as your roots. But still, there is an opening. The opening is called forgiveness.
Your new self-awareness is giving you the gift and opportunity to send love to yourself first. And when you forgive yourself, your choice of how you’re going to behave and act is becoming a no-brainer.
But, you also get the opportunity to see this new situation in a new light through forgiveness.
By sending love to whoever is the familiar character in your situation that used to trigger you. Your mom, dad, sister, brother, relative, co-worker or stranger, and the outcome of the situation is turning into something completely new when you send love and forgive instead of acting with fear and anger.
If you feel forgiveness and can see the situation in a new light, that’s how you know you have grown.
You have surrendered. You’re ready for new personal growth goals.
By surrendering you stand in your power. You’re free.
Do you feel and react exactly the same way as you always have, you still have some work to do.
Do you notice a change in how your thoughts, feelings, and actions are showing up now vs. in the past?
How can you forgive yourself for your past and love yourself completely?
Related: How to Find Self Love and Become Your Own Guru.
