Last week we talked about progressive overload and its use in training for muscle hypertrophy. With that groundwork, you can better understand this week’s article: how to apply the principles of progressive overload to your personal development.
In developing yourself, you use many of the same tools that you would use in developing your body.
- Tracking and measurement of Performance.
- Precise Exercise Selection for precise results.
- Emphasis on weak or lagging areas.
- Application of the specificity principle.
- Application of the overload principle.
Continual development of the self is key to everything in life. Whether improving your work performance, relationships, or social skills – all can be improved by progressively overloading these elements of yourself.
I. Understanding Progressive Overload in Personal Development
A. Defining Progressive Overload
If you missed last week’s article, progressive overload is a key idea in physical training. It requires you to apply a stimulus that will activate growth of the body [overload], and continue to apply and increase that stimulus to maintain progress.
Your development must be progressive because what improves you today will be too easy to improve you tomorrow. This applies to weight training as well as personal development. Addressing your basic weaknesses in socialization will require some basic tools. But as you become advanced, those same tools will be insufficient for allowing you to progress even further.
What pushes you beyond your zone of comfort as a beginner may be a warmup for you as an advanced person, both as a lifter and as a charismatic [or whatever/whoever you are trying to become].
B. Establishing a Baseline
The process of improvement always begins with an analysis of where you are right now. You cannot get better if you do not know where you are currently.
When an athlete sits down and writes down the primary demands and requirements of his sport, this is called a “Need’s Analysis”. And it is an excellent way to articulate the basic necessities of your sport.
The same applies to your life and personal development. What are those basic, intermediate, and advanced skills that you need as a human being?
Write these down.
What do you need to do to be able to function in society, succeed in society, and thrive in society [novice, intermediate, and advanced categories]?
If you are going to improve, you have to be self-aware and self-critical. Not to a pathological degree, but no one ever improves by pretending they have no faults.
| Life Skills * Time management and organization * Developing a growth mindset * Basic problem-solving and decision-making skills. * Effective communication skills (listening, speaking, and writing) * Financial literacy and budgeting * Self-awareness and emotional intelligence * Goal setting and planning * Health Discipline (exercise, nutrition, sleep) * Stress management and resilience * Adaptability and openness to learning * Self-Discipline (push yourself when you don’t want to) Business Skills * Basic understanding of business ethics and professionalism * Familiarity with common business terminologies and concepts * Work Ethic * Basic customer service skills * Basic project management skills * Basic knowledge of marketing principles * Basic financial analysis and budgeting * Basic problem-solving skills in a professional context * Understanding workplace etiquette and teamwork * Basic networking and relationship-building skills Relationship Skills * Active listening Eye contact mastery * Body LanguageConfrontation and conflict resolution * Building and maintaining trust in relationships * Effective communication skills in relationships * Showing appreciation and gratitude * Setting boundaries * Developing and nurturing friendships * Negotiation and compromise skills * Understanding and navigating emotions in relationships * Developing empathy and understanding others’ perspectives Spiritual Skills * Mastering daily Bible reading * Showing up to church despite how you feel * Interacting with other Christians in positive ways * Being uplifting * Developing a consistent prayer life * Waging perpetual war again sin * Developing an accurate understanding of the Bible * Attending a doctrinally correct church * Obeying the Gospel through the process of salvation |
These are just a few examples, but you can see how you can easily list out skills that you need to be able to survive in the world.
Then split these into categories like novice, intermediate, and advanced that are unique to you. You will be advanced in some skills but novice in others. And no two people will be alike.
This is a critical chance for you to take an honest look at your weaknesses, write them down and analyze them from a third-person perspective, and then actually make some improvements.
II. Identifying Areas for Progress in Personal Development
A. Self-Assessment:
Assessing yourself starts with honesty and humility. Most people live their entire lives ignoring their flaws and weaknesses. This is understandable because it is painful to look at our flaws and weaknesses at first. But avoiding this responsibility robs most people of the level of self-development they could otherwise achieve.
With the groundwork of humility and honey laid, you need to identify your goals. This will be based on a combination of your current levels of development and where you want to go and how you want to improve.
If your social skills are lagging, then you need to set some goals for how you are going to improve.
What do people with strong social skills do?
- They make consistent eye contact during a conversation
- They add to the conversation
- They are funny
- They stay engaged and off their phone
Look at people you admire who have the skills you want to develop and identify what it is that makes them so good at socializing. While studying them, see what you can model. What can you attempt to copy?
B. Setting Challenging Yet Attainable Goals
Your goals have to be crystal clear. They have to be attainable, yet demanding in order to achieve.
Some promote the SMART framework for goal setting (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant/Realistic, Time-bound) in personal development.
This works for some while others have a hard time with it. You have to decide what will work for you.
But the specificity of goals is critical. You will not get better at a thing without specifically working to get better at it. Just like the biceps will not grow from sets of squats, so also social skills do not improve from sets of “work ethic” for example.
III. Implementing Progressive Overload Strategies
A. Expanding Knowledge and Skills
For growth to be continued there must be a persistent demand placed upon them. And this demand must progress on a linear basis.
There has never been more free information available than what you can find on YouTube.
You can learn social skills from Charisma on Command.
Or You can Learn about Discipline from Jocko Willink and the Jocko Podcast.
You can Learn about neuroscience from College lectures or from Andrew Huberman.
And the list goes on forever. Whatever it is you want to learn, or whatever you want to get better at, you can find people teaching it online – and they give away much of their material for free!
There are also courses and workshops offered around you. You can find these with a simple Google search.
Do you want to get better at public speaking? See if your city has a local chapter of Toastmasters.
Want to learn self-defense, find a jui-jitsu dojo in your town.
Some colleges offer free workshops and seminars with speakers.
The only limit in finding ways to improve yourself is your own ability to think creatively and find out where the people with the information are. Find them, then learn from them, and place progressively greater challenges on yourself to improve.
B. Cultivating Resilience and Mental Strength
The ability to recover quickly from failure and get back to work is a skill that will propel you to success. Because if the average Joe writhes around in his state of failure while you get back on the horse immediately, you are already that much farther ahead of him.
And this is certainly how most people live. We hit difficulty or failure and then just wallow in it. We get down in the dumps and invite our negative emotional state in for dinner. Some might say this is a normal part of processing a negative event, but I would argue that this action makes one adverse event far worse than it should have been. Something that could have been processed and ended is now a long-term emotional event.
Emotions exist to motivate action. We are not supposed to feel negative and then just sit there in a negative state. We are supposed to take action. Take some steps in the direction of our goals. Get back on the horse and we find that the emotion will resolve. It is just there to get us to press on a little more.
So when you hit failure, get excited. Know that it is one of the pathways for growth. And it is a pathway that so many people rarely experience because they hide from it.
The average person spends their whole life hiding from failure. As a result, they never attempt anything worth accomplishing. They are so afraid to fail that it prevents them from ever even attempting. This keeps them in a perpetual state of mediocrity in all of their life endeavors.
And as sad as this is, it presents you with a potent opportunity. You can get ahead of the vast majority of people in life simply by building a different mindset, taking different actions, and not shrinking back from failure when it appears.
Everyone fails – do not be the loser who stays down when he fails.
IV. Monitoring and Adjusting
A. Tracking Progress
Monitor progress towards your goal. Just like you might keep a training journal, it may be worthwhile to try keeping a personal development journal.
This journal should have your primary goals as well as notes and field reports tracking your progress.
If you are working on socialization, you can track how many people you approached to talk to at church. Record your performance and your emotional state before, during, and after the event. This will serve to teach you that you can act in accordance with your goals regardless of how you are feeling emotionally at any given time. This is a great lesson. You have to know that you can act with discipline and push yourself to do anything you want despite your emotional state at the time.
Learn that and you will be ahead of the world.
B. Adjusting the Load
It is critical that as you progress, you increase the demand you are placing on yourself. If you push yourself to talk to 5 people at church, at some point it needs to become 6. Or the conversation needs to progress to a deeper level. Whatever it is, you have to increase the difficulty or volume of what you are doing. That makes your development progressive.
As you progress, you may find that some goals no longer suit your purpose. Maybe you realize that you will never be able to be at a master level in some skill without a lifetime of work. Or perhaps your personal development in the social area caused you to find areas of weakness in other aspects of yourself.
Whatever the case is, you are not married to your personal development plan. You can pivot, shift, and change all along the way.
V. Overcoming Plateaus and Preventing Burnout
A. Recognizing Plateaus
Just like in physical training, as you progress, you will hit areas of stagnation, places where improvement becomes slow or impossible. This is not a problem, just a part of the process.
The first thing to do when hitting a plateau is to keep cool and keep your wits about you. Most people throw in the towel right here. That’s right, at the very first hint of weakness, they give up. While sad, it means that all you have to do is not give up to ahead of the average person.
Next, examine your current plan. When you hit plateaus in the gym you can switch out exercises, rep schemes, splits, etc. What can you adjust or switch out in your personal development plan? If the only socialization you get is at church, and you continue to interact with the same people over and over again, that is the equivalent of doing the same exercises, with the same rep range, with the same intensity for months on end. Of course that will get a little stale and slow your progress.
Maybe you can add some additional socialization. You can attempt to talk to people in public (I know, the horror) or at events or shops. You have to introduce some form of novelty to your plan to break the monotony and allow for continued improvement in new dynamic situations.
Look at those you are modeling and see what they do in different situations. Look to them to develop advanced skills.
B. Avoiding Burnout:
Anyone who has attempted to improve themselves over a long enough time will tell you that there are moments when they want to quit the entire thing. They are not making progress on any fronts, they are frustrated, and they want to go back to the way they were.
When this happens in exercise, we introduce a deload, where we reduce volume, load, intensity, or a combination of any and all of these in order to allow the body to recover and potentiate the potential for gains.
In personal development, you can do this by simply backing off the advanced versions of skills and going down to a baseline.
What level of performance can you consistently generate without conscious effort?
The benefit of personal development is that at some point, your skills at a specific level will be able to be automated. You behave better automatically.
Whatever that level is for you, back off your personal development to this level. Instead of quitting completely, just deload to a level that is manageable without you having to think.
This will allow you to not give up completely on your habits, but also give yourself a break from what you are doing.
Incorporate these strategies for applying progressive overload to your personal development and you will be ahead of the crowd.
