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Means of personal change

May 23rd, 2008 by Osman

Latest note to the personal change group.

when we talk about change, there are different connotations of that word for different people. therefore, before we go on, I find it important to spend time on the notion of change. imagine a person who wants to lose weight.

for this person to change, we can make diet plan based on calories. but most of the time, this doesn’t work. the simple reason to this is that the person cannot use the plan. a more complicated reason would be that although she/he uses the plan, the plan doesn’t work. in that case it would be beneficial for her/him to work with a doctor who is experienced on such cases.

in this example, one can handle the calory calculation by herself/himself. we have internet, we have sites out there telling which food have what calorie, etc. one can do this plan without the help of anybody.

but what if one prepares a plan and could not use it for some reason. what would be the solution? one option may be to give up on losing weight but we don’t want that. so, we can now talk about the necessity of change.

thus, i can also briefly explain why i like to use the term personal change instead of personal development.

in the above example, being not able to lose weight is no longer a physical issue. it is nnot possible to use a calorie plan to lose weight. on one hand, one wants to lose weight but because of several relevant or seemeingly irrelevant reasons, on cannot achieve her/his goal.

in that case, i suggest to choose a method for personal change and work on it. I don’t want to put a limit on this options. I will not mention many methods here. this is not because I don’t like those methods or don’t appreciate them. It’s just that I don’t have experience on them.

so in that fashion, what we have today for change is things like psychotherapy, life coaching in which a professional person will hold a mirror to you. there are also other things that may help on the way. they are the knowledge of change that people accumulated since thousands of years.

for this second part, i am going to make literary suggestions. for the first part, i will discuss several psychotherapy techniques and schools as well as life coaching so that one can know what to expect and how to prepare.

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How Pollyana affects personal change

May 9th, 2008 by Osman

Here is a crosspost and the content of another message I sent to the group personal change. It’s a crosspost because this is something I have written back in January, 2007 on another blog: You Have Every Reason To Feel Better.

I think the worst effect of the novel Pollyanna is the popular imagery of an optimistic person in people’s mind. This novel is so popular and so talked-upon that the character named Pollyanna has been exaggerated in her optimistic nature. We always make fun out of her optimism. Unfortunately, we tend to humiliate this optimism later on.

If you take something good and make so much fun out of it, it becomes the new bad thing. So, under peer pressure, we decide that optimism is not good to deal with life. Everybody looks like that they would accept us and agree with us when we tend to be pessimistic about life. Therefore many people try to win the race of being the first who criticize the other. It feels like when you are the first to criticize the other or simply yourself, then there is no room for others to criticize you.

The truth is that we don’t like to hear criticism, even the ones that people call constructive criticism. Once the name includes criticism, it signifies that somebody is going to have a say over our behavior. Of course, this is a wrong perception. However perception becomes reality.

In fact, most of the time, human being’s depression and anxiety is about living and being. Since you exist and most probably you are not going to die in the moment, you have every reason to feel better. Better than nothing.

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Personal Change group on Facebook

May 7th, 2008 by Osman

I have created a group on personal change on Facebook. Here is the address of the group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10661521114

This group is going to be bilingiual, in Turkish and in English. So far, I have only made one announcement about two or three books and I made it in Turkish. I will start doing my announcements and send messages in English immediately after at least one person who doesn’t speak Turkish and can understand English joins the group.

I hope we will make a significant change.

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