Dear Tristan,
I am a bit confused as to what personal development means and what it entails. How is personal development different from self-help, self-improvement, human potential, or personal growth? Can you help me clarify this?
Thank you,
Jeanette Merlow
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Hi Jeanette,
I agree with you. There is quite a bit of confusion in the field about what exactly personal development is and what it is not. I will do my best to clarify what personal development is for you.
What is Personal Development?
Personal development is the improvement of specific life skills that are necessary to facilitate happiness and success in personal life. These life skills are the building blocks that make up every success or failure you have in life. Personal development skills become the foundation from which all your achievements in life flow and have a direct bearing on winning and being successful in life.
A key distinction between personal development skills and other skills you might possess is that personal development skills are used 24 hours a day, whereas you can only use your programming skills eight hours a day in your employment capacity. . When you talk to someone, you are using personal development skills. What you decide to eat is personal development. When you investigate your feelings, that is personal development. Even managing your sleeping habits belongs to personal development.
Personal development skills are life skills that must be honed in order to reap the benefits of a life worth living. Investing time in personal development leads to a peak performing individual living a fuller life than those who choose not to develop themselves.
What is not personal development
Personal development does not involve diagnosing or treating illness or injury. There seems to be a general confusion in the field of personal development as to what it is and what it is not and since there are so many books in bookstores and libraries that misclassify mental book disease in the self improvement section of the store, let me clarify that point. A key characteristic of someone who wants to practice personal development is that they are usually healthy, normal people who are able and willing to move on in their lives. In other words, they want to become top-performing individuals.
On the other hand, a person who is unable or unwilling to move on in life and seek happiness and success in life due to past illness, trauma, or injury that prevents them from doing so, needs treatment or therapy to assist in their recovery. Recovery. These are people who are not performing normally and their goal is to perform at a normal capacity. In other words, they want to recover.
The many other faces of personal development
In the realm of my own coaching practice, I see personal development, self-improvement, and personal growth as the same thing. I see self-help as slightly different than personal development in that self-help topics tend to be less focused on personal growth and more on remedying a certain condition, hence why there are so many books in the self-help sections of bookstores. and libraries that focus on dealing with problems, rather than creating peak performance.
The ten components of personal development
The definition of personal development will vary from person to person, but through my experience as a personal development coach and former police officer, I have discovered that there are, in fact, ten key areas that comprise an individual’s peak performance. These focus areas are:
- Purpose of life: Having a life purpose gives meaning to all the activities and goals that you set for yourself throughout your life. We all know how to use the time we have in life, but unless we make sense of those activities that occupy our time, then our lives will be completely meaningless.
Life purpose subsections include:
- Legacy
- Values
- passions
- talent
- Spirituality
- Goal setting: Goals are the stepping stones that allow you to reach your legacy in life. Any successful person knows that in order to achieve personal success in life, he must challenge himself and strive to achieve more than his status quo. Goal setting is a powerful success skill that allows you to win in the game of life.
The goal setting subsections include:
- Display
- Strategic planning
- Productivity: The problem many people have when setting goals is that they start taking shortcuts to get what they want and end up bitter and discouraged because goal achievement doesn’t work that way. It’s like someone who wants to get on the podium and receive a gold medal at the Olympics without spending time training. While we can’t take shortcuts to reach our goal, we can shorten the time it takes to reach those goals by being more productive. Successful people are masters of productivity, and it’s no mistake that they can accomplish more in less time than most people. Learning to be productive and make the most of the time you have is an important part of personal development.
Productivity subsections include:
- Time management
- organization
- prioritizing
- delegate
- Solving things
- Motivation: If goals are the path to personal success, then motivation is the fuel to get there. Motivation is a necessary aspect of personal development because almost all of us know that a lack of motivation considerably hampers our process of achieving goals. Learning to master your motivation can help you achieve success faster than you ever thought possible.
Motivation subsections include:
- Inspiration
- role models
- liability partners
- Pain-pleasure principles
- self-awareness: Emotions can enhance or hinder our performance. Emotions act like a thermometer that tells us the quality of the experience we are experiencing. Therefore, it is necessary not only to understand our emotions, but also to learn how to use them effectively. Self-awareness involves intrapersonal communication, which is the ability you have to really communicate with yourself and identify your inner desires and needs.
Subsections of self-awareness include:
- emotional intelligence
- Responsibility
- Anger control
- unconditional love
- Intuition
- Marketing: No matter how good you are at a certain skill or how much you want to contribute to others, nothing will matter if people don’t know about it. All the hugely successful people throughout history knew how to market themselves and it is crucial to everyday life. If you’re married or want to be one day, that means promoting YOU. If you have ever been through a job interview, then you were using marketing skills. Those who know how to market themselves or their products simply enjoy more luxuries than those who don’t know how to market themselves, regardless of actual competition or skill levels just because people know them.
Marketing subsections include:
- Marketing YOU
- Marketing of services or products.
- networks
- Physical Health: Your body is the vehicle that carries your thoughts and intentions into the real world. Therefore, you want to have a vehicle that is well maintained and runs smoothly. Keeping your body working optimally includes eating well, exercising, and managing your stress levels.
Optimal Health subsections include:
- Physical aptitude
- Diet
- asleep
- Stress
- Relations: The definition of synergy is the coming together of two or more entities for the purpose of creating together more than any one of them could have created alone. All higher relationships in your life should involve synergy, and creating synergy with other people involves the skills of empathy and communication. Success in life is never a one person project. It’s about many people and it’s about synergy.
Relationship subsections include:
- Empathy
- Communication skills
- Negotiation
- conflict resolution
- interpreting body language
- Leadership: Every successful person who has ever lived has been a leader in their respective fields. A leader is one who paves the way for others to follow and has the courage to stand out from the pack. A leader is an agent of change and is flexible enough to adapt to unexpected events that come their way. They show others the way when that way is not clear.
Leadership subsections include:
- Courage
- Decision making
- Problem resolution
- Responsibility
- Money Management: For personal success to happen, you need to achieve financial freedom, which is the point where you make enough money that you don’t have to worry about money. Money is energy and you need to learn how to manage that energy for optimal personal development.
The money management subsections include:
- Entrepreneurship
- delivery value
- invest
- Money Management
I hope that clarifies personal development for you.
For passion and purpose,
tristan
Copyright © 2007 Tristan Loo. All rights reserved.