Self-Improvement – Just Pick One Angle and Get On With It

It seems there are so many good things to do in this life—where do we start? And if we’re a disciple—of Jesus I mean—that’s going to be the pulsing nerve centre of thought, is it not? ‘What is God’s will for my life right now?’ could be the sentiment. It’s like ‘What do I focus on in improving myself.’ There seems so many things... so many things that the mind boggles at the thought of the list that’s visualised.

We can easily become despondent at the enormity of “the task” or disparate in our methods of addressing these. But, we must always endeavour to keep it simple and be kinder to ourselves than we generally are.

The answer has to be, ‘Don’t fret, just start!’ Two such things I thought of focusing on recently were, to be ‘more honest with myself and others,’ and ‘love my kids more.’ Yet, the moment I take these down to committed memory, there flood in two more, and then two more after those two. It’s not even as if I’m that dishonest with others or could even love my kids more, but there you go!—always something to do... God’s not finished with me yet.

The key issue seems to be that if we impact our self-improvement goals say for honesty, we’ll be better for our kids i.e. ‘loving them more,’ in any event.

And this is so true to life. We do one good thing and it has invariable spin-offs in other seemingly unrelated areas. Try it; you might be pleasantly surprised.

Picking one angle (or only a couple) keeps things simple for us (we’re all simple creatures after all) and that helps us focus on what is really important—for each particular season—the relationships in our lives i.e. intrapersonally (with ourselves), interpersonally (with others) and suprapersonally (with God).

We must be disciplined to hold to one or only a few improvement initiatives at a time, then “chocking” these as sustainably maintained ‘units of competency’ as we move onto other things. It would be no good moving onto the next self-improvement initiative if we hadn’t already stabilised the present one.

© S. J. Wickham, 2009.