Podcast - Episode 0179 - Your Personal Development Timeline

In this episode Joel and Antonia talk about understanding where you are in your process and timeline of personal development.

In this podcast you’ll find:

• How do you know when advice is right for you?
• Often we put that down to personality type. Good advice for one type may be terrible for another.
• We believe advice comes in a more three-dimensional model.
• Advice today may be terrible for you, but that guidance in a year or so may be exactly what you need.
• Getting Things Done by David Allen
• System’s Thinking podcast
• Nothing is cause/effect. Every result is the emergent of an entire system running.
• The parts of the system are called nodes.
• One node we have a tendency to gloss over is where we happen to be in the stream of time.
• Something that is working for someone else may not work for you because of where you are in your personal growth journey.
• Or, something that has been working beautifully for you has stopped working because you have moved on.
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t Hardcover by Jim Collins
• What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Goldsmith & Reiter
• Are you holding onto strategies that no longer work for you?
• Or are you rejecting strategies that may work now but didn’t work in the past?
• Timelines are important considerations in everything, including business, relationships, and personal growth.
• We miss the concept of timelines in personal development.
• When we feel stuck in a personal growth project, and we aren’t making the progress we want, we forget the fact that things take time.
• Some of our growth projects may be lifelong.
• In the early days of our personal growth, sometimes the best advice we can receive is to be aware of the habits we have.
• Notice we are doing something when we are doing it. That’s the first step.
• Over time, we can start building strategies to avoid getting to that space.
• What are the systems creating the behavior?
• If you are stuck in your personal growth, you may be in a different phase, and you need new tools.
• Three meta-models (a model other models can fit into) that help us gauge where we are in the timeline:

1- Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:

• If you don’t have base needs met, you can’t move into the higher needs.
• Physical needs need to be met first before exploring spiritual needs.
• Many people settle with basement needs and forgo the spiritual ambitions.
• Self-esteem can seem very similar to Safety and Security.
• When you are trying to figure out where you are in your growth process, determine where you are in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
• Then figure out where your personal development goal falls in the hierarchy.
• This isn’t a lifetime thing. It’s a moment to moment thing.
• Think of yourself as stratified along this hierarchy and ask yourself what life circumstances are governing you right now.

2- Dependence, Independence, Interdependence Model (7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey):

• We go through these phases with almost everything that comes into our world, including our personal growth.
• Interdependence is your ability to choose your relationship with something after experiencing dependence and independence from it.
• If we ignore our obstacles, we can’t recognize them enough to control them.

3- Graves Model/Spiral Dynamics:

• Advice for someone at Graves 3 is going to be terrible for Graves 6.
• We naturally gravitate toward people that are where we want to be.
• So, people at higher levels of the Graves Model will often give advice that works for them but won’t work for the person at a lower graves level.
• We are looking for individuals who have gone through our experience but aren’t so far ahead that they are out of touch with what it means to be at our level.
• Once you self-diagnose where you are at in the Graves model, take your personal growth projects and find where they fit on the model.
• What is the best advice you would give to someone at a different level?
• This helps us see other people with more compassion when they are in a different phase than we are.
• Sometimes, certain parts of us may be at lower Graves levels.
• We can also see where someone is stuck if they have been in a phase for way too long.
• Is someone who is stuck and unwilling to move going to help us on our growth journey?