By Peter Nicholls -

Are you working longer hours than you want? Do you feel your work/personal life stresses are stunting your natural growth and sapping your emotional energy? Compare your growth with that of a plant you see growing and blossoming naturally to its full maturity. If you’re a gardener you will know sometimes that plant needs pruning and re-shaping to enjoy new vigorous growth.

If you feel a desire to enjoy new vigorous personal growth, there are some practical, enjoyable steps you can take to ‘prune and re-shape’ your lifestyle. Whatever your situation, there are always adjustments you can make to ensure you are in charge of creating the best life for you.

To achieve your natural life potential, you were born with a unique array of talents, abilities and skills, to be used and developed to the full. You also have passionate interests, which are the natural resource for developing those unique capabilities. Add to this the fact that we are social beings. You grow best when you connect with positive, like-minded people who share similar interests and passions.

If you get all of this through your work you are extremely fortunate. If however you get personal growth only through your work, you are living a narrow life in which only part of your potential is being developed. You are missing out on many of the other riches of life that you were destined to obtain. It may be you won’t fully appreciate this point until you are facing the lack of, or reduction in, your job and wonder what is left for you in life. I speak from personal experience and I also know that it is never too late.

“I enjoy respect, dignity, status and recognition – I wish I could get the same from my job”. You may be one of many who don’t enjoy your job. Perhaps you made a bad choice but also perhaps you had to take on your present type of work, simply to pay the bills. If so, you will have found the need to have strong interests away from work. You will already appreciate how much those non-work interests have enriched your lifestyle.

Passionate interests away from work are as important to your life growth as work. They can be physical, intellectual, artistic, musical, social, manual, or spiritual. When you lose yourself in an interest you love, you find yourself. Virtually any interest will invigorate your growth so long as it engages your senses of creative thinking and goal achievement.

The work ethic used to be that work was everything and anything else was nothing. One of the good things about the current stressful times is we are learning a rich life is much more than striving for material wealth.

The problem is that work pressures are forcing excessive priority on to work-related interests and many other passionate interests and related talents are increasingly being pushed aside. Life-changing events still hit us however and suddenly we find we are in our 50′s and starting to see life differently. If you don’t make the effort to stop and check the direction you are going, your tree of life will remain stunted.

Whatever your present situation, there is still plenty of vigorous personal growth to be achieved. Enjoy doing a self-audit on

* your range of natural skills, talents and abilities – especially those you have used little in recent years.

* your passionate interests, especially ones you have let slide because of other priorities

* positive people you love connecting with because you share similar interests and passions

* re-assessing your priorities on where you allocate your emotional energies. Consider giving more attention to your passions and potential – through work, home and play. You will have to do so one day so good to start doing so now.

You now have some valuable material towards developing a new life plan, that creatively expresses the real you in ways that enable your natural potential to blossom.

You are invited to visit http://www.workleisure.com for further information on Peter Nicholls’ approach to lifestyle management affecting work productivity. Peter Nicholls can be contacted at  peter@workleisure.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Peter_Nicholls