Why Personal Growth is Important to a Fulfilling Life, and How to Achieve It

Personal Growth & Fulfillment Plan + Worksheet

Tony Robbins puts it simply, “Progress = Happiness.”

As humans, our natural inclination is to grow and evolve.

Standing still is intolerable to our spirit which is the fuel of our humanness.

You’re either growing or you’re dying.

Growth helps us feel alive.

Tony Robbins has identified growth as one of the six basic human needs—it is a need of the human spirit, who you are at your core, and it creates fulfillment.

If you truly want to be fulfilled, then you must pursue growth.

Pursuing growth requires creating goals—the markers for growth.

Tony explains, “If you don’t grow consciously, life will give you something to grow from.”

Goals are tools to concentrate our focus and move us in a direction.

Growth isn’t always comfortable or easy.

One of my favorite quotes from Master Life Coach and Author, Brooke Castillo, is, “Discomfort is the currency for completing our dreams.”

If achieving goals and dreams were easy, everyone would be doing it.

It isn’t, however, and this is why so many choose the long term discomfort that comes with not growing over the short-term discomfort felt while pursuing a goal.

As a life and weight coach, I help women achieve their dream for a healthy, sustainable solution to lifelong weight management.

What a healthy, sustainable solution looks like is different for each woman I work with.

For some it involves stopping overeating through understanding and managing desire and urges around food.

For others it involves learning and understanding their hunger signals so they may only eat when truly hungry.

Others have had the goal to stop emotional/stress eating by learning to feel their emotions and not react to them by dulling them with food.

Another common goal I help women achieve is giving up flour and sugar in order to reduce the unnatural spikes in the hormone insulin these concentrated substances cause so they may eliminate the cravings and withdrawals that come from the lack of these substances.

No matter what your vision of growth looks like, there is a way to plan, make it a priority, and watch your outcome unfold.

What would you create if nothing were impossible for you?

I have drawn ideas from successful growth coaches like Craig Manning, PhD, Tony Robbins, and Brooke Castillo to find my personal goal setting steps that work for me and many of my clients. Here are my 10 steps to create a “Personal Growth & Fulfillment Plan:”

1. Brainstorm 10 things you want that are currently a little beyond your reach, but not too far.

2. Choose one of your wants as a goal, and rewrite it, if necessary, to be very clear and measurable. If what you select is far beyond your reach, meaning it will take more than a month to achieve, then break it down into smaller goals that may be achieved in one week or in one month, max.

3. Why do you want to achieve this goal? How will attaining this goal move you in a direction towards where you want to be (fulfill your purpose)? Is this goal in alignment with your values? Spend some time here really understanding why this result is so important to you, and double-check that you like your reasons.

4. Use my fillable .pdf worksheet found here, or designate a notebook or journal to this goal, and each morning, write this goal down. This is a super-important step because it lays the foundation for habit formation (moving information from your prefrontal cortex to your amygdala).

5. Next, in the morning, write down steps you can take and/or skills you can utilize today to move you towards your goal.

6. Take those actions during the day.

7. At the end of the day, evaluate and write down 2 actions that produced results today and moved you towards your goal.

8. Next, write down one action you could perform better tomorrow.

9. Take that action item and place it in your growth plan for the next day.

10. Repeat steps 5-9 daily until you reach your goal.

Once you have achieved this goal, have a new goal to work towards.

Tony Robbins encourages having something new to go for quickly so you don’t lose your momentum, and so your happiness will not diminish as a result of the “Law of Familiarity.”

He explains, “the ‘Law of Familiarity’ states if we are around anything or anyone long enough, we tend to take them for granted.”

The biggest prize in growth is who you become along the journey, and not what you get.

Follow my 10 steps for Personal Growth & Fulfillment Plan, and start creating your life instead of living at the effect of it.

If you have trouble with creating your plan, or you find you’d prefer to work with a coach on your personal growth plan, reach out to me (tara@newrhythmlifecoaching.com) to sign up for one-to-one coaching.