Tag: personal-growth

Visualize your future and step towards it: Looking around to see the limits of motivational techniques

December 17, 2025

Look again at the strange and impossible meme above. It tries to visualise the rationale of the motivational technique in which you ‘visualise your future and step towards it’. In theory, visualising where you want to be makes you more likely to visualise and practice the things you do to make that future possible. Hence, … More Visualize your future and step towards it: Looking around to see the limits of motivational techniques

Events have no agency in them. Responses to events do have such agency.

December 7, 2025

Apologies for another nit-picking response but this question embeds a very poor assumption that events are a cause of well-being or ill-being, the former being positive the latter negative. It is an assumption built into that facile tool in developmental psychology, the Life-Events Inventory. Here is a description of it, followed by a brief history … More Events have no agency in them. Responses to events do have such agency.

The limits of ‘Feeling the Fear and Doing It Anyway’ can be felt standing at a cliff-edge!

January 26, 2025

Susan Jeffers’s book, Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway: How to Turn Your Fear and Indecision into Confidence and Action, is by now a kind of holy text of popular psychology, used not only, as it was intended, at first at least, to address anxiety that locks people into extremely limited lives but to … More The limits of ‘Feeling the Fear and Doing It Anyway’ can be felt standing at a cliff-edge!

Expectations, illusions and realities. The issue of the ‘first day’ at something.

December 4, 2024

The Indeed website is an online job search and career placement service, describing itself as the ‘#1’ of its kind. About this I can’t comment on, although their own description is below (part of it at least): Detail of: https://www.indeed.com/about However, I noticed that it raises the issue of the first day at a new … More Expectations, illusions and realities. The issue of the ‘first day’ at something.