Become an artisan of your own character

The internet is saturated with influencers promising to lead the way to being the best version of you or living your best life.

But what does this even mean?

And have these people spent enough time honing their own characters in the cut and thrust of life to credibly guide you anywhere?

Or are they people who've just built a brand - an identity - to build an audience that can be monetised, that makes them successful in the marketplace of personality?

Like many popular ideas, there's often a kernel of gold that people are chasing when they follow such personalities. The very openness to changing the way we do life to make the most of it, can be a profound thing. And so we sign up and follow along in the hope that they might know where they're going.

But much of it is fluff and nonsense. It's posed and curated and shallow, and it takes us nowhere significant.

The one-liners and Insta posts are catchy and can give the impression of thoughtfulness. But they are often just vapours - vacuous media designed to impress us, draw in our attention and then sell it off. 

A BETTER LIFE GOAL: FLOURISHING

I want to suggest to you that instead of these vague slogan-like goals, you consider a more credible, substantial and meaningful goal for directing your life: flourishing.

Flourishing is brave and real and deep-seated. It doesn't need Insta posts to impress people - the way you are in the world will be enough to do that. And in fact, flourishing lets go of the misguided acts of impressing people anyway - instead focusing directly on the precious prizes we mistakenly think they will bring - things like connection and belonging. 

Flourishing cuts through the nonsense and gets straight to the stuff we're yearning for deep down.

Flourishing is not the next new thing. It's not the next trend in self-help methods. Quite the opposite. It's the ancient and well-worn path carved out by the wisest of our human ancestors. It's the path of character development, and it's a pursuit that wise humans across cultures and across time from the ancient Greeks to the Buddha, have explored and taught.

It's not the realm of the quick-fix, although there are practices that can bring about rapid shifts.

It's not the realm of burying, side-stepping or glossing over the unpleasant aspects of life or pretending it's all good.

Neither is it the realm of ego, image, or identity curation.

It's the realm of bone-deep change that results in groundedness, calm, joy, clarity of mind, and a quiet, unshakable confidence that we can deal with whatever comes our way.

It's the realm of practice - day in, day out, experience by experience.

It's the realm of real connection with others, of seeing that we really are all in this soup together, striving for the same things, making mistakes, struggling with our reactivity, chasing the feel-good factor only to find that it doesn't last.

It's the realm of true authenticity - of allowing our experience to be what it is, and responding to it with skill and care.

It's the realm of deeply taking in the pleasant aspects of life and letting them affect us viscerally rather than racing off to chase the next one.

It's the realm of courageously allowing ourselves to be touched by the joys and pains of those around us, of allowing our hearts to do what they naturally do - resonate with the being-aliveness in our world in all its shades.

If the shallow imagery of personal brand is at one end of the spectrum, character development is at the other. It's the deep, thoughtful, reflective, practical, wise approach to refining our own characters amid the ever-moving sea of real life. 

TWO PARTS TO FLOURISHING

Clichés aside, flourishing truly is about a journey - your journey that is your life. And like most journeys it has two parts:

1. the itinerary (the signposts we follow) and

2. the way we travel (how we do it)

   
   

Here at Flourish Personal Growth, we focus on both. The itinerary is the Nine Elements of Human Flourishing. Think of them as the nine planks that make up your life raft (I talk about them in my TEDx talk here, you can read a blog post on them here, assess yourself on them quickly here, or in more detail here).

These are the experiences we want to embed in our lives - the signposts we want to follow. They replace the misdirects from the dodgy signs we see everywhere - wealth, fame, beauty, material stuff.... all the things marketers sell to us. We literally see these everywhere, on billboards, online ads, streaming ads, and ..... from influencers.

We need to shift our gaze away from these mirages, and onto a better north star - the Nine Elements.

The way we travel this itinerary is about character development. Like an artisan practicing their craft, this is about seeing, understanding and working skilfully with our own experience. Our mind activity, emotions, and body sensations are the materials we work with here.

Day in, day out, we practice working with the stuff that is our lived experience of life. Like an artisan, we can learn our craft from those who have been practicing it for years, who've experimented, developed skills and achieved difficult things.

You won't find many of these artisans on Instagram, X or TikTok.

Our intention here at Flourish is to bring you the gold from our wisest ancestors, blended with modern science, in a way that makes sense in our time. We'll help you with key practices for becoming an artisan of your own character - reflection, insight, practical tools, and importantly, community. You can have as little or as much involvement as you want.

In summary, flourishing has two parts:

Having the right stops on your itinerary (the Nine Element of Human Flourishing)

Traveling it well (becoming an artisan of your own character)

This is the path of a rich and fulfilling life.