Time flies - we all know that; one day we're a teenager, and the next, we can't believe how teenagers are dressing. As we move into and live our adult lives, our circumstances change; we live in the grown-up world with grown-up responsibilities, jobs and children. These circumstances however, don't always mean that we act like grown-ups, and they don't guarantee an automatic maturity. So what does it mean to be mature?

10 Signs of Maturity

1. Integrity.
Are my behaviors reflective of my values? Am I trustworthy, consistent, and do I keep my promises?

2. Composure. more

Our past experiences and the people from it, play a huge part in our present perceptions and behaviors. We mustn't confuse behaviors with identity however; the essence of who we are at our core and our personal existence is something that is ultimately unchangeable; we are all valid human beings with our own individual purposes in life. How we choose to behave, and how we react to others and certain situations however, is what charts the course of our lives. Emotionally, most of us have old childhood wounds which have conditioned our responses into adulthood. If you find yourself re-living… more

Proper communication is one of the corner-stones of a healthy relationship. Like many of the fundamentals, it's a skill we tend to learn by osmosis as children, the level of that skill having a lot to do with who we grew up around. Children usually model themselves after their same-sex parent, and adopt many of that particular parent's characteristics in their quest to find their own person. These characteristics are often ingrained by family and societal dynamics, and stay with us into adulthood. This helps to explain why we see generations of men who are "emotionally unavailable", and generations of… more

Did you know that as babies, we're only born with 2 fears, the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises? All other fears that we possess have been learned! While this may seem shocking, it's actually great news since whatever we've learned, we can unlearn... As Franklin D. Roosevelt so aptly put it during his inaugural speech in 1932, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Have you ever stopped to contemplate exactly what he meant by this? Out of the things we fear, (whether it be spiders, rejection, heights or failure etc.), it is… more