Do you want to realize your full potential? If yes, then you have to start working on yourself.
This might sound obvious but it’s not. What does it even mean to work on yourself? You might think that it’s about achieving something but that’s not the case.
In this article you will learn what personal development really is and how you can get started on the exciting adventure of realizing your dreams.
Inside this Article
What is personal development?
Personal growth, self-growth, self-help, self-improvement, and self-actualization are used interchangeably and basically mean the same thing.
As humans, we have a need for growth. If you ignore this need, you will live an unfulfilling life.
Psychology is linked to personal development. Psychology is about understanding your mind. Your mind influences how you see the world and yourself. It influences the results that you get.
If we look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs by Abraham Maslow, we will see that the need for self-actualization is at the top.
Most people are focused on fulfilling their lower-level needs, like safety and belonging. Because of that, their higher needs get neglected.
What you must understand is that personal growth is not a luxury. It is a need that we must fulfill to be truly happy. But first, you have to fulfill your basic lower needs. Then you can focus on higher needs like personal development.
Fulfilling our higher needs is when life gets exciting.
Personal development is also connected to spirituality. With a spiritual connection to reality you can transcend your social conditiong and bad habits.
What I want you to understand from this article is that this journey is much more than just achieving some success. Success is external, but personal development is internal.
You have to become someone before you can do and have what you want. Becoming this version of yourself is what will truly fulfill you. All of the pleasure you get from external rewards cannot compare to the fulfillment you will get from being the best version of yourself.
“Success with no fulfillment is the ultimate failure.”
~ Peter Voogd
Personal development involves activities that enhance our quality of life, as well as improve our identities and our awareness of them. This process helps us realize our dreams.
Growth happens at the individual level but also in organizations and collectively. Businesses that want to maximize their profits must focus on promoting individual personal development. By doing so, their employees will become more energetic, productive, and motivated.
The personal development process refers to:
- building a theoretical foundation
- methods and techniques
- going through courses and doing the exercises
- assessment systems
- using our strengths to create a better world for all
- Being more conscious
- removing limiting beliefs, assumptions, fears, emotions, and everything that is not in alignment with the best outcome for all living beings and replacing these things with empowering beliefs and behaviors
This process helps you to improve your attitude, mindset, habits, behaviors, responses, and fundamental life choices.
Our identities are formed mostly unconsciously in our childhoods. With personal development, we take responsibility for our identities and the results that we create. The process of forming our identities becomes more conscious and less mechanical.
Sometimes, difficult situations trigger our need for growth and awaken our desire to grow. Other times, people get inspired to grow after they read a book. The ideal scenario is for you to get inspired to grow, so that you’re not doing personal development from a place of desperation/negative external motivation.
There are many subfields within personal development. Most people discover this path through the subfields of success/productivity/goal-setting, business and entrepreneurship, and dating and attraction.
What you become on the journey to your destination is much more valuable than what you can get. What you become directly influences the results that you get.
This process starts with personal development. You will be developing positive character traits while breaking free from limiting factors. This will enable you to create life from the inside out.
The first step on your journey is getting to know yourself. This is the most important step that most people neglect. Because of that, most people are stuck in information overload and are submissive to the expectations of others. Getting to know yourself, including your values, beliefs, and purpose, narrows your focus and makes decision-making easier.
It helps you stay authentic and is a necessary step to becoming an authority in our lives. This journey is about being more of who we are, not being like somebody else.
So, you need to design your lifestyle based on who you are. You need to do some self-exploration first.
Everyone is on a different path of personal development. Our path depends on what we want to become and achieve.
Increasing our awareness is a fundamental part of personal development. Awareness will help you discern what you like and what you don’t like. You have to be mindful of all the messages that point you in the direction of who you are. With awareness of what you don’t like, you will become wiser.
Asking yourself questions is an important part of the discovery process. This will allow you to discover your life purpose and your authentic self.
Increasing your mindfulness during the day and practicing meditation will help you to notice all of the limiting thoughts and emotions that require your energy to survive.
By becoming aware of everything that is in alignment with your life purpose, values, strengths and authentic self, you will notice more things that are not in alignment with them.
The ego—your constructed self or sense of self—will not like the light of your awareness because it will start to dissolve it. So, the ego will try to maintain itself with all kinds of tricks like backward rationalizations, justifications, judgment, distractions, etc.
So, on the path toward realizing your dreams, the only thing that will stop you is…you...TA-DA! What will stop you is basically just selfishness and ignorance.
SUGGESTED: Understanding self-sabotage
Personal development is not about only the things that you do. It is also about the things that you don’t do.
You will become less distracted and more focused. You will clearly see the value that comes from doing those few important things. The apparent socially-constructed value of distractions will fade and you will do the things that are valuable to you.
You will become more proactive and better able to handle life situations.
On the journey of personal improvement, you will be more positively internally motivated. You will be more aware of why you’re doing things. You will become calm, composed, and in control.
You will develop a great attitude toward difficult circumstances because you will see the big picture.
Your relationships will improve and you will hang out more with people who make you better.
You will let go of the things that no longer serve you. You will be more aware of your mistakes and negative habits, which will allow you to learn from and correct them.
By doing personal development, you will positively impact other people. By taking care of yourself, you will be able to take better care of others.
Personal development improvement areas:
There are many areas you can focus on improving to empower yourself.
- health / fitness / nutrition
- success / wealth or social status
- self-awareness and self-knowledge
- self-esteem and confidence
- building skills
- quality of your emotions
- dating life and relationships
- spirituality – meditation, mindfulness, yoga
“Arthur Chickering defined seven vectors of personal development for young adults during their undergraduate years:
1. developing competence
2. managing emotions
3. achieving autonomy and interdependence
4. developing mature interpersonal relationships
5. establishing identity
6. developing purpose
7. developing integrity” ~ Wikipedia
Shifts that happen as a result of personal development:
from being a victim to being a creator
from being addicted to being sober
from self-sabotage to self-empowerment
from focusing on problems to focusing on solutions
from being inconsistent to being consistent
from being dogmatic about your worldview and beliefs to being open-minded
from being out of balance to being balanced emotionally
from being reactive to being responsive
from being unattractive to being attractive
from having low energy to having high energy
from having a poor self-image to have a great self-image
from being insecure to being confident
from lacking direction to developing a purpose
from having toxic relationships to having healthy, empowering relationships
from consuming mainstream media garbage to reading non-fiction books
from unhealthy nutrition to healthy, whole-food nutrition
from being out of shape to being in shape
from having unhealthy coping mechanisms to having healthy coping mechanisms
from being busy to being productive
from being religious to being spiritual
from falsehood to truth
from being separate to unity
from not loving anything to loving ourselves, and from loving ourselves to loving the entire universe and all sentient beings (notice how everything that was mentioned previously is connected to increasing our capacity to love; this is where personal development merges with spirituality)
When personal development doesn’t work:
For growth to happen, you need to step outside your comfort zone. By doing what is uncomfortable, you will develop a newly expanded comfort zone.
People give up in the middle because they lack vision and commitment. What you should envision is that you will feel much worse in the beginning when you start doing personal development.
This path is like lifting weights. You become sore after a workout. That’s not bad; it’s sorta the point. When these emotions come to the surface, you can free yourself from them.
From the spiritual perspective, you will give up on this path when you become submissive to your energetic thought-emotion-based system.
You become a slave to your own mind if you allow and accept the thoughts and emotions to steal your attention from what is truly important for all beings.
What you truly are is not a thought or an emotion. This is where personal development merges with spirituality. You have to take responsibility for your self-created thought-emotion-based system and start using it as a tool.
You have to stop being a sheep that blindly follows his thoughts and emotions. You have to take back your power and stop being asleep while you’re driving through life.
This journey tests the ability of our eternal self-directive power.
The 2 commitments you need
For personal development to become effective, you need to make two life-long commitments:
- Commit to life-long learning / self-education
- Commit to doing the practices and techniques regardless of how you feel
When you learn a new technique, you will get an initial wave of excitement. This will bring faster results, but this emotional high will fade over time. People tend to give up when the initial excitement of starting something new fades away. So, you need discipline, dedication, and persistence to keep doing the techniques.
Some techniques will work wonders for you, while others won’t. You will need to experiment with various techniques and figure out which ones work best for you. During this process, you will need to stay patient. Figuring out this stuff takes time.
You will encounter plateaus. To keep going, you’ll need the vision and commitment to move past them.
Wrong pacing is another reason why people give up on this journey. You need to be strategic about your pacing. If you try to implement 10 new things at once, you will burn out and keep backsliding.
The key to improvement is small, incremental improvements.
Growth is non-linear
Most people think that growth is a linear curve.
However, what I found is that it looks more like an exponential curve. You start at the beginning with no idea about what you’re doing. In the first year or two, you see very few results for your invested time and energy. But then, at one point down the road, the investment that you made in yourself starts to snowball and exponentially grow.
Personal development plan:
Making a plan for your personal improvement will enable you to quickly assess where you are and how you’re doing on your journey. It will allow you to know if progress has actually occurred. Many people give up on this path because the results are not always measurable.
To create a plan, you need to first understand where you are on your journey.
Writing things out about your situation will improve your self-awareness. Self-awareness is the first step in making an improvement. You cannot improve something that you are not aware of. So, awareness is the first step. You will build more awareness by doing an investigation. This investigation will start with you assessing your current state.
Step 1: Where are you now? Describe your current situation. Rate yourself on a scale of 1-10 in the following areas: nutrition, exercise, relationships, success, spirituality, emotions, self-esteem and confidence, self-awareness, knowledge, productivity, and lifestyle.
Step 2: Where do you want to be? Develop a vision. When do you want to be there? Why do you want to be there?
Step 3: What do you need to do to get there? What areas do you need to prioritize and focus on now? What character traits do you need to develop?
Step 4: Write about insights that you had during the process. What did you learn during the process? Did you notice something that you need to sacrifice to get to your destination?
Step 5: Journal about your progress during the journey. Reflect upon your performance and learning.
Regular review of these activities will help you stay on track toward your goal.
Growth is a process
There is no end to improvement. The process is the goal. Set your goal, then forget it and just focus on the process. As long as you follow the process, the results will take care of themselves.
By sticking to the process, you will connect your life to the dream that you envisioned. Because of that, you’ll feel a sense of aliveness and purpose. That’s what you ultimately want.
Not that thing over there, but this thing right here.
True growth is internal
Achievement brings a short-term sense of pleasure but not fulfillment.
Personal development plan
Making a plan for your personal improvement will enable you to quickly assess where you are and how you’re doing on your journey. It will allow you to know if progress has actually occurred. Many people give up on this path because the results are not always measurable.
To create a plan, you need to first understand where you are on your journey.
Writing things out about your situation will improve your self-awareness. Self-awareness is the first step in making an improvement. You cannot improve something that you are not aware of. So, awareness is the first step. You will build more awareness by doing an investigation. This investigation will start with you assessing your current state.
Step 1: Where are you now? Describe your current situation. Rate yourself on a scale of 1-10 in the following areas: nutrition, exercise, relationships, success, spirituality, emotions, self-esteem and confidence, self-awareness, knowledge, productivity, and lifestyle.
Step 2: Where do you want to be? Develop a vision. When do you want to be there? Why do you want to be there?
Step 3: What do you need to do to get there? What areas do you need to prioritize and focus on now? What character traits do you need to develop?
Step 4: Write about insights that you had during the process. What did you learn during the process? Did you notice something that you need to sacrifice to get to your destination?
Step 5: Journal about your progress during the journey. Reflect upon your performance and learning.
Regular review of these activities will help you stay on track toward your goal.
Growth is a process
There is no end to improvement. The process is the goal. Set your goal, then forget it and just focus on the process. As long as you follow the process, the results will take care of themselves.
By sticking to the process, you will connect your life to the dream that you envisioned. Because of that, you’ll feel a sense of aliveness and purpose. That’s what you ultimately want.
Not that thing over there, but this thing right here.
True growth is internal
Achievement brings a short-term sense of pleasure but not fulfillment.
Conclusion:
Time and money spent on personal development are never wasted.