Hey, this is Leo, for actualized.org.

And in this episode, I'm going to be talking about fake growth versus real growth. It's very easy to deceive yourself when you're doing personal development into thinking that you're actually growing

When really you're not fixing the root issues that are causing the deepest problems in your life.

You tell yourself in a sense that you're growing,

but actually you're not.

And in general, what I find is that when we enter personal development,

those first few years that we're doing it, we're just kind of trying to orient ourselves. We're not really sure how this whole field works yet, how it's going to fit into my life, how it's really going to affect my life. And what you have is you have these cartoon caricatures of what

growth will look like.

So let's say you come into personal development and you have a problem like you feel shy and secure or you're not able to attract women or you're not able to find that dream relationship that you want or that marriage that you want or you have trouble losing weight or you're struggling with business and with your finances.

Whatever the issue is, you tend to think that, okay, so I need a solution, right?

So people come into this stuff because they want a solution to a

burning problem in their life. So they come in there and they say, okay, what's the

solution going to look like? And in their mind, they're just kind of imagining

almost in a childlike way how this issue is going to be

resolved for them. And so it's funny because some of these childlike cartoon

caricatures are just so unrealistic that it points us in the wrong direction

as to where to look for solutions.

What are some examples?

Well let's say you got a shy guy, right? Someone who's not cool with women and he's not very confident with men.

So he comes in and he's the oh how I'm and I become real confident. My

solution to this problem is I'm going to be the the super alpha confident guy.

And then he goes looking for that. He thinks that's really going to be how the issue is resolved

...