Seven Personal Development Resources That Improved My Life in 2018 (Part 1)

[This is Part 1 of a two-part series on the very best personal development resources I discovered—and was changed by—in 2018.]

On a sleepless night a few weeks back, I realized that 2018 has brought me more variety in personal development resources than any year prior. Some of them arrived serendipitously, while I sought out others explicitly in order to better help my clients.

As I lay there in the dark, counting meaningful resources instead of sheep, I came up with seven that I'd like to share with you. And I don’t just want to give you a list of links to check out—I want to tell you the why behind these picks—why I was drawn to them, why I recommend many of them to my clients, and why you might want to explore them for yourself.

If you’re familiar with any of these, leave a comment below and share with us your experience of it. Too, if this post encourages you to seek out any of these resources for yourself, circle back here and let us know how it landed afterward. I’d love to get some conversations going.

A BOOK

I read several fabulous personal development books this year, but this one’s easily head and shoulders above the rest:

1. Michael Neill’s The Inside-Out Revolution: The Only Thing You Need to Know to Change Your Life Forever is a book I’ve recommended more times than I can count this year. I just can’t think of a single person who wouldn’t benefit from learning about how thought works—and how we can transform our experience in a matter of moments, just by understanding what’s happening inside our minds. Its brevity (124 pages) is deceptive, however; you’ll read it once, then you’ll need to let it sink in for a bit before immediately returning to the beginning to take it all in again. In plain language, Michael points to three simple principles that explain where our feelings come from and what our experience of life is truly composed of. Spoiler alert:

No matter how scary or oppressive or insecure your experience of life may be, once you realize that it’s only your own thinking that you’re experiencing, that thinking loses much of its hold over you. You may still feel uncomfortable feelings, but because you know that what’s causing them isn’t outside you, you don’t feel compelled to change the world in order to change the way you feel, any more than you would go to your television set to try to convince the characters on your favorite soap opera to change their foolish ways.

I can’t say it more emphatically: Read this book.

A YOUTUBE CHANNEL

I’m continually bowled over by just how much punch is packed into these 12ish-minute videos:

2. Dr. Amy Johnson’s Ask Amy series is composed of a weekly video that answers real viewers’ questions about how thought works in specific situations. Topics range from “I’m afraid to drive on the highway. How can I get my freedom back?” to “How do I deal with envy and inadequacy now that my ex is in a new relationship?”, and everything in-between. I’d recommend pairing the Ask Amy videos with Michael Neill’s The Inside Out Revolution (as mentioned above). Amy’s work showcases a really practical application of the principles that Michael covers—so, if you’re slowly starting to wrap your head around the nature of thought, but you’re not quite there yet, poking around in the Ask Amy archives will no doubt round out the concepts for you, using real-life scenarios. If the specific example that Amy’s speaking to doesn’t apply to you and your life, give it a chance anyway; I’ve found that it’s really helpful to have proof that no matter how exceptional a situation might feel, the same principles hold true each and every time.

AN INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT

As with the personal development books I read this year, wonderful Instagram accounts abounded—and I discovered many that I adore. However, one in particular brought me a tremendous insight:

3. Keitha Young, @thepeacefulseed, is a new mother in New Zealand who writes with exquisite candor about trauma integration and resilience medicine. I found her late in her pregnancy, shortly after she’d had emergency surgery to remove her entire large intestine and install an ileostomy, when she’d begun sharing about the experience of almost losing her life. Keitha’s writing brought me new insight this year. She’s actively fighting the impulse to overcome her past traumas, which is something many of us struggle to do (but believe it’s the only way forward), myself included; instead, she’s working to integrate them into who she is now. How? By feeling them, allowing them to exist, processing them, sharing them, receiving counseling for them. It’s her belief (and now mine) that if we can actually move through our griefs (versus getting over them), if we can fully assimilate those exceptionally difficult life experiences, we’re ultimately more whole and empowered. Keitha is actively working on this—she’s not reporting to us from some several-steps-ahead place where she’s already got it all figured out—and this is what makes her writing and sharing all the more compelling to me.

A QUESTION

Early this year, I was surprised to learn that in the realm of personal development, really powerful answers can sometimes arrive in the form of questions:

4. Teal Swan’s “The Great Shortcut to Enlightenment” was brought to my attention by a dear friend. Although I was at first skeptical of this new-agey woman who appeared before me on my laptop screen, I was really taken with her simple process for cultivating unconditional self-love. The process takes a full calendar year (which is long, but hey, it’s still a total shortcut when you consider the topic of enlightenment!) and it involves asking yourself one specific question any time you have to make a decision—and then living your life according to the answer that emerges in response. What’s the question? “What would someone who loves themselves do?” (The sloppy grammar irks me, but I’ll live.) Admittedly, I didn’t engage in this process over the course of an entire year (more like a few days, as an experiment), but I absolutely see the value in doing so and would encourage anyone who’s actively struggling with unconditional self-love to take this on as her one assignment for 2019.

Stay tuned for part two of this series, next week.

What's GOOD ENOUGH, anyway?

As if to prove just how interconnected we all are (and how blissfully unaware we are of this), my coaching calls in any given time period all seem to center around a particular theme.

The theme lately?

GOOD ENOUGH.

What's GOOD ENOUGH, anyway?

Well, for a lot of us (I’d venture to say all of you who are reading this post), GOOD ENOUGH seems to mean settling with subpar work; it’s the slippery slope to mediocrity; it’s the status we allow ourselves only when we’ve absolutely run ourselves into the ground and are plumb out of time and bandwidth.

And even then, GOOD ENOUGH is less an empowered choice than it is a reluctant surrendering.

But really: What’s GOOD ENOUGH? Like, objectively-speaking?

It’s hard to tell.

(Let’s be real: No objective definition of it even exists. It’s a concept, a metric that only a mind could create. And we all know how contradictory and nonsensical minds can be.)

Anyway, regardless of your current, working definition of GOOD ENOUGH, I’d like to propose a new, possibly radical understanding of it.

GOOD ENOUGH is shorthand for two separate determinations:

This is GOOD, and

this is ENOUGH.

Why two separate determinations?

Well, my clients are accustomed to excelling and even then, pushing themselves to do more and better.

When they hear my suggestion to aim for GOOD ENOUGH, they’re quick to see it as a single unit of measurement: From their perspective, an effort that’s GOOD ENOUGH has barely cleared GOOD.

They see the ENOUGH part as a mark below, a minus, points deducted—instead of the qualifying score, a clap on the back, the solid achievement that lands them (still!) in the top percentile.

And when GOOD ENOUGH is seen as something that barely clears GOOD, it’s no wonder we’re going to be far less inclined to willingly aim for it.

(After all, who wants to barely be GOOD?!)

This means we’ll continue to aim for EXCELLENT when it comes to each and every endeavor on our list and in our life—and, in the process, cheat ourselves out of the satisfying feeling of being good and being enough...and being able to move on to the next thing that needs our attention.

From my work with clients, then, here’s a list of what we’ve decided about GOOD ENOUGH: 

• GOOD ENOUGH is sanity-keeping.

• GOOD ENOUGH is sometimes EXCELLENT, sometimes GOOD, but never POOR or BAD; though it will inspire some fear of the latter two, that fear will prove to be unfounded every single time.

• GOOD ENOUGH can’t shape-shift into anything less than GOOD ENOUGH.

• GOOD ENOUGH doesn’t sit atop a slippery slope.

• GOOD ENOUGH isn’t actually detectable by others.

• GOOD ENOUGH leaves room for many other endeavors to be GOOD ENOUGH (whereas EXCELLENT usually doesn’t; one thing gets to be EXCELLENT while everything else sort of falls off the radar into...not so much POOR or BAD territory, but more like...OBSOLESCENCE).

• GOOD ENOUGH is GOOD; GOOD ENOUGH is ENOUGH.

What’s your working definition of GOOD ENOUGH?

Do you like this one better? (It's yours to keep.)

One way to find peace

It’s April!

As I write to you, a winter storm's rolling into our neck of the woods.

(But…it’s April.)

The weather reports continue to change, but it's looking like we could wind up with anywhere from seven to ten inches of fresh snow.

(But…it’s April.)

This is where I'm tempted to stick that emoji of the face screaming in fear, eyes whited out, head turning blue. You know the one.

But I'm not going to, and I'll tell you why.

All through late-February and into mid-March, I welcomed the random snow flurries, even as they came after unseasonably warm weekends.

Even after it seemed we were on a 40- and 50-degree streak (that's, like, seven to ten degrees for you Celsius folks; not exactly t-shirt weather, but a far cry from your typical harsh winter temperatures).

I felt fine about winter weather because it was, well, winter here.

As others groaned on social media over each new snowfall, I delighted over how magical it all felt.

Snow, for me, has never been anything other than enchanting.

Then, as March was wrapping up and we started seeing signs of spring (crocuses on the nearby college campus! Buds forming on the trees), I'd get out of bed each morning, twist open the blinds, and exclaim playfully to my husband, "Snow!" even though there was none.

It became a running joke, and it was funny only because it was truly possible.

As Dana's told me many times before, there's usually one last snowstorm of the season—sometimes in April, sometimes even in May (horror of horrors; I want to insert that screaming emoji again)—here in northeastern Wisconsin.

At the same time, I found myself wincing a little when I first heard the news that this storm was coming.

I surprised myself by feeling badly about the weather.

It was as though my magical, snow globe feelings had vanished because it's spring, dammit, and I need the weather to reflect that!

But I don't want to be the person who needs the weather to go a certain way in order to feel okay about life.

The reason I'm not channeling that screaming emoji is because it’s the face of someone who’s resisting what is.

And if there’s one thing I know about resistance, it’s that it’s the source of all suffering.

Not the weather. Not the seasons. Not foiled plans or thwarted hopes.

Resistance to what is.

Do I want it to be spring?

Yes, of course.

And guess what?

It is spring; it's just that this spring, the spring of 2018, looks like this where I live.

Actually, let me correct myself. This is what today looks like. (See how quickly my mind wanted to make this a blanket statement about all of spring?!)

It looks like crocuses one day and a white-out the next.

This is exactly how it's supposed to be—because nothing else, no other reality, exists for April 3rd, 2018 in northeastern Wisconsin.

Do you get what I'm saying?

Nothing is wrong here. Spring isn’t broken. April 3rd isn’t failing or falling short.

It’s just this.

We 😱suffer😱 when we believe things are supposed to be different from how they are. When we need life to be different from how it’s showing up.

So, instead of suffering today, I'm taking my cue from the robin outside my window. He’s been perched in one of our two crabapple trees, watching the snow fall since I first sat down in front of my laptop to write this note to you.

(Just as I typed that sentence, a different robin landed in our other crabapple tree and is doing much the same—sitting, waiting, watching, and puffing out its feathers to stay warm.)

Like the robins, I'm going to exist in this moment (what other choice do I have?), but minus all the commentary on how this moment isn’t right and ought to be something else.

And that, I think, is peace.