Why Self-Development Doesn't Work (3 problems)

 Summary

Most self-development practitioners fail to sustain meaningful growth over the long term. In this video, I discuss 3 specific problems most self-development advice suffers from to be better informed in your journey.

Transcript

What if I told you that there's something deeply broken within the traditional self improvement world? What if I could prove to you that there's a specific reason why all of your efforts haven't bore fruit when trying to transform yourself? Let's get to it.

Hey, everyone, Leon Castillo here, CEO & Founder of Selfmastered. We help entrepreneurs scale their businesses by transforming the personal performance. Now, before we begin, remember to subscribe, as we release a few juicy videos every week to help people like you transform their performance.

Today, I want to discuss a subject that I believe is very important. And I think you need to hear this from me because there's a lot of self-improvement content and material in the internet. And that obviously serves a purpose, and it's helping millions of people become better. But in my opinion, there's a massive problem within the self development industry that goes on at moulage.

And therefore makes all that content effective, or at least just placebo for those who happen to believe in their benefits. And these problems come from right from the start, right, because some people have started in the in the midst of the 20th century, and it started as some sort of feel good category, then it became a new age thing.

But it never really focused on scientifically improving the person that consumed that content. Because there was not out willingness. And the goal was not to fix people. The goal was to get people hooked to that content, which is why I'm going to share with you the three main reasons why self development, most of it doesn't work, and more importantly, what to do about it. Reason number one is that it is not personalized.

See, we have unique problems, each person is unique. And therefore each self development journey must reflect this. If we do not leverage our unique conditions when trying to develop ourselves, we're going to have in effect results, right. And this is why when we train people in peak performance, the first thing we do is elevate their self awareness, understand exactly what it is that is not working within themselves, and then fix that bottleneck first.

Because any system doesn't matter if it's a mechanical system, or the human body in mind will become more effective when bottlenecks are solved, not when you double down on your strength, right. But in order to really drive effective behavior and improve people you need to know what's that bottleneck and self development, the traditional service industry does not care.

There's unidimensional approaches for everything, how to be motivated, how to be focus all the time, how to be high energy, how to find a woman or a man of your dreams. There's a bunch of different approaches to solve problems, but they do not really address the core problem. And what's the problem? Well, each person has his own core problem, our responsibility is to find it and make sure it is solved.

So lack of personalization is the number one problem I see in the self development industry. Because your needs are not the same as my needs because we're two different people. Reason number two is there's no data behind it. And not having data is the first step towards fooling oneself. Remember, that is very easy to fool ourselves. So we need to prevent that from happening by gathering objective feedback.

And that feedback normally comes from data, which is why they once you understand exactly what it is you're trying to solve, because you have elevated your self awareness in a way that it's obvious. That's the biggest bottleneck.

The second step is what systems can I put forth to improve that bottleneck? And how can I track that improvement? Because if I don't track it, I don't know if it's working or not. It's not working without data. We end up believing in placebo. We end up believing we are progressing, but oftentimes, we are really regressing, right.

So that's reason number two without data. There's no way of knowing the truth and when trying to improve ourselves. Truth is the only solid ground in which we can stand and then number three, and this is very important, and it's probably something that you're not going to like but engaging in too much self improvement ends up being a substitute for hard work.

There's nothing that can beat execution. So if you keep reading book after book after book without really doing anything to implement all that things, all those concepts that you're learning then Chances are that you are diverting your attention to that instead of actually working on what matters, self improvement can end up being a substitute for real progress. And in fact, the brain has trouble differentiating between what's real and what's not real, what's accomplished and what's actually dreamt of accomplishment.

So if you really try too much to fix your problems in a theoretical way, you will not even chase to solve them in a practical way. And this is a huge problem for most people that engage in self development. How many motivational videos have you watched on YouTube? Probably more than 50? Do you feel more motivated per chances are you don't? Why is that?

Because motivation does not come from consuming content motivation comes from understanding what are the neuro psychological mechanisms behind a lack of motivation, and actually solving those right? I hope these example brings the point home, you need to keep this front and center in your mind, the only thing that's actually going to improve you is what you do to get that improvement.

And that's almost certainly going to be found outside of books and courses and videos that you may be watching.

I hope this was useful. Please let me know in the comments if you learn anything, if you believe I'm being too harsh on the traditional self development industry. And of course, if you have a performance problem, or you just want to become an absolute machine, we have a proven program that gets incredible results. And we could probably help you out even itself.