Self-improvement helps strengthen strengths, improve mental health, and even heal relationships. Some ways of self-improvement include simple tasks like reading a book, trying something new, doing mediation, or even waking up early. Self-improvement has become mainstream. Over the past few years, since I've been writing articles and submitting them to article sites, I've noticed that the "Self Improvement" category has been popping up lately when it was never there before. This is very good news for me.
But what does it really mean to "self-improve"? What are we really improving when we improve ourselves? And what "I" are we improving?
We each have two selves – our wounded self and our core self. Our core self is our true self, our natural soul self – our essence. Our core Self is our passion, our joy, our gifts and talents, our ability to love, our creativity. We come into this life as our core Self, and when that Self is loved and appreciated by our parents, we continue to grow naturally in our God-given gifts and talents and manifest the fullness of our beings. This Self wants to improve by learning the skills needed to fully express itself.
But when this Self is not seen and valued as we needed, we create an alternate self, a self that we hope will be in control of how to get the love we need and avoid the pain we cannot handle—the self, that helps us feel. safe. This is our false self, our wounded self, our ego self. This self is filled with false beliefs that we absorbed growing up—beliefs that ultimately limit our true, core Self. This self does not need improvement – it needs healing.
The term "self improvement" can sometimes be a bit misleading because we don't want to improve our wounded selves. We don't want to get better at the ways we lie, manipulate, and avoid in our attempts to be in control of getting love and avoiding pain. We don't want to improve our many addictions to substances and processes. We don't want to improve our anger, our compliance, withdrawal and resistance.
We want to cure it.
Healing and improvement are not the same thing.
When it comes to skills, we can certainly improve ourselves. We can improve in sports, fine arts, music, writing, cooking. We can improve our health and well-being by improving our diet and exercise program. We can improve the knowledge we need to be more successful with work and money. We may be able to improve our relationships by learning new communication skills. But what if acquiring new knowledge and skills doesn't improve our health, our ability to earn money, or our relationships? And what if learning new skills doesn't bring us more joy and inner peace? It may mean that we need to heal the underlying fears and false beliefs that cause us anxiety, depression, stress, guilt, shame, withdrawal, anger, blame or sadness.
Sometimes self-improvement means just practicing a skill, and other times it means we have to participate in a deep healing process. For example, many people try to improve their health by losing weight and exercising. But if their food addiction is masking unhealed pain, they may not be able to just change their diet. They may need to open themselves up to the healing process to eventually get better.
If you are truly trying to improve yourself but find yourself stuck and unable to make progress, or find you have no joy or inner peace, you may want to open up to the possibility that unhealed pain and beliefs are blocking your progress and causing your pain. It's easy to improve when there's nothing standing in the way. But if you have old false beliefs about your adequacy and worth, those beliefs can block your ability to act lovingly on your own behalf. All your efforts at self-improvement will not bring you the satisfaction you seek if you have beliefs that limit you from fully expressing your true, core Self. If you are stuck, then you need to seek out a healing process, such as the inner connection process we teach, that will move you out of the fears and beliefs that are limiting you. Healing these fears and limiting beliefs will open the door to improving your life in every way! “Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything
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