Barriers To Personal Growth
One of the barriers to personal growth is the lack of commitment. One of the key points I stress in my book, The Life Champion In You, is the need to make totally committed decisions in life rather than just making wishes. When people do not commit to doing the things that they want to do, quite often what ends up is that they do not do those things.
I will be starting planning for the winter ski season soon and one of the activities that I do is teach skiing. One of the groups I teach for is a social ski group in Toronto. This will be my 3rd season teaching for them.
We just completed a survey among the members and one of the questions we asked was which days would people prefer to ski and take lessons. The results came back as over 70% of members indicated that they would want to ski on the weekends and over 50% wanted to take ski lessons either on the Saturdays or Sundays.
This was not completely surprising since it is assumed that most members work from Mondays to Fridays, leaving only the weekends for possible ski days. So just like last year, I will plan a few weekend ski days for the members.
Lack Of Commitment
Many of these members often complain that they don’t have anybody to ski with and that they would love to learn to ski better with confidence. The idea of taking ski lessons is quite appealing to them as many members are at the beginner to intermediate level.
However, when we ran a few of these weekend ski days last year, we only got a small handful of members who actually showed up at the designated ski resorts even though many signed up for these trips. I estimate that only 20% showed up.
To me, this is a severe lack of commitment on the part of those 80% who signed up for ski days and did not show up. These are the folks who want to learn and have other people to enjoy the ski day with but for various excuses (which really didn’t hold much water in my mind), they did not commit to their plans.
If coming out to ski was part of their personal growth as well as social growth, since ski days offer opportunities for both, these people certainly didn’t achieve their goals in this area. It was their lack of commitment that caused this.
Their lack of commitment also wasted my personal time waiting for them at the ski resorts. Instead of standing outside waiting for them, I could have been skiing.
So this season, our ski group has approved the idea of implementing an advanced payment requirement in order to get booked on a weekend ski day. If a member signs up and does not show on the ski day without a really valid excuse, their advance payment will not be refunded. This is only fair.
People’s lack of commitment which prevents them from achieving success is certain one of the main barriers to personal growth. This lack of commitment should also not negatively impact others too. So out ski group’s advance payment requirement will either make those who sign up for ski days to be more committed and/or discourage those who cannot commit from signing up in the first place.
Both of these consequences of such an advance payment requirement are fine with our ski group.
Remove Barriers To Personal Growth
No matter what your own goals are in life, to be successful, you must remove as many possible barriers to personal growth as possible. One of these will be the lack of commitment that is so common out there.
To get exposed to and get inspired by a lot of very motivational examples of making totally committed decisions which have resulted in great success stories, see my main title in personal growth books.
