There is a lot of information available on the internet that should help you with your personal development. However, some of this information digs deep in your mind and raises questions you might have never thought about. Eventually, when used the wrong way, personal development information also has its risks. My respected colleague Henrik Edberg from The Positivity Blog wrote an excellent post about the five most common ways personal development can “screw with your head,” as he says. I summarized them for you and added some thoughts of my own as well.

1. It helps you to overcomplicate stuff, instead of making things easier

You have looked in books and on blogs. You haven’t found perfect answers so you look a little more, just to be on the safe side and to avoid failure and the pain that comes with that. And so the problem becomes bigger and more complicated in your mind for every book or article you read. Taking action becomes something you start to fear more and more because it all seems so huge and complicated now.

2. It gets you emotionally hooked and makes you want to read more and more

And so little action is taken because that is uncomfortable and scary. While getting another hit from some personal development source feels pleasurable and safe. It kinda feels like you are making progress and going somewhere as you read that awesome book. But shortly after you have read it that feeling diminishes. And so you read another one to get a rush of those positive feelings again.

My thought: You do not grow faster by reading more stuff in a shorter time. Eventually, developing yourself takes time on the long term.

3. It leaves you confused, instead of secure

One problem with the information overload age we live in is that you can get more than you can handle. For free. Tony Robbins may say one thing. Eckhart Tolle might say another thing. Taking in advice from 10 people at once can confuse you and lead to ‘paralysis analysis’ – not doing anything because you cannot make up your mind.

4. It makes you feel like you aren’t ever ready or good enough

This can become a big problem. When you get hooked on reading this stuff you may start to feel that aren’t quite good enough yet to start taking action. That you aren’t good enough to succeed with something you’d like to do. In part it can be a form of protection from the pain and effort that comes with action. In part it can be because knowing more and more but not using it keeps a low self esteem in its place (or makes it sink even lower).

My thought: Never forget that you became a better person since you consciously started working on your personal development.

5. It makes you think that things will be perfect and you will be too

It’s very easy to fall into the trap of looking for magic pills. That basically mean you look at something – a book or a just a tip – as a complete and quick solution for your problem. You think that this thing will “fix you”, just like a pill from the doctor could. But this is self improvement. Sure, someone may make a lot of money or lose a lot of fat really quickly. But for many any improvement will be gradual. It will be slow sometimes and quicker at some points. It’s a process that takes months or years.

Little by little you improve yourself, but never to perfection. Over time all those small steps forward really start to add up.

So what to do about it?

How can you avoid these problems? A few tips Henrik uses:

• Keep these things written here in mind. Just keeping these pitfalls in mind and being aware of them help to be a bit careful about how I think and behave’
• Set limits. It is useful to set limits for yourself so you don’t overconsume personal development material. For example, make sure that you are consistently taking action towards your goals 80 percent of the time. And then you read and study 20 percent of the time. Not the other way around;
• Take some action immediately after having learned something. Don’t wait, then you just want to read and prepare even more. Jump in instead and do one little thing to get started.

Photo by jmitch