The quality of your relationships, including the relationship with yourself, your self esteem and the way you respond in conflicts or manage difficulties in your life depend very much of the time you invest in your personal development or personal growth.
In this post you will learn about what personal development is, to help you see if it is what you need.
What is personal development?
The way I see it, personal development or self development is a process that helps you improve something about yourself. It helps you get to know yourself better, improve certain sets of skills or learn new skills. This process helps you become a better version of yourself.
What personal development means is growth. It means you discover and improve your qualities, strengths, skills, options and boundaries. You can learn to accept yourself and value who you are as a person. It is a dynamic commitment, a road to self-fulfillment, and becoming who you are in the depths of your being. Self development helps you become more authentic and feel good with yourself.
Personal development helps if you want to progress, test your limits beyond your comfort zone to maximize and fulfill your personal potential.
Is personal development important?
Personal development is important if you want to do something to be a better person. I think that we all want to improve ourselves in different areas in our life, or do things better. This helps us feel better about ourselves, it makes us feel more capable and worthy.
Personal development can be important for some people and not important for others. If we look at the pyramid of needs, the personal development needs are at the top. Hence the people who have all the basic needs fulfilled will think about self development and will seek to read books or work with a psychologist or coach to improve themselves. The people who do not have the basic needs fulfilled will be preoccupied to tick them first. They look at the base of the pyramid before they go up to self actualization needs, which are at the top.
How can personal development help you?
Personal development has many benefits and can be a great tool for you because you can unlock your potential and grow as a person.
Some of the most important benefits of personal development are that you:
- Know yourself better. You can discover things about yourself you didn’t know you have.
- Become more aware of who you are and what your qualities are.
- You can learn important skills such as: assertive communication, giving a speech, manage your time more efficiently, change your personality for the better.
- Change the way you see yourself. The negative talk and criticism can change.
- Become more confident. Knowing who you are you learn to trust yourself more.
- Focus on developing healthy habits that make you feel better with yourself.
- You may become more determined to follow your dreams and reach your goals.
- You may gain clarity on what you ant to do next. Knowing who you are, what your strong qualities are and trusting yourself you may start to know what you want to do next in life, relationships or in your career.
- Decision making becomes easier.
- You learn to respect yourself more.
- Learn to work on your negative traits to become a better person.
Who needs personal development?
Anyone can find themselves at a point in life when they need to grow personally. Personal development is for people who:
- Want to learn more about themselves.
- Wish to develop their self esteem and self confidence.
- Want to learn and grow their soft skills.
- Want to overcome their shyness and become more social.
- Desire to enlarge their boundaries.
- Push themselves out of the comfort zone.
- Push themselves to be better people.
- Want to overcome blockages in their life, relationships, career.
Personal development versus professional development. What is the difference?
Personal development is about you as an individual. Professional development is about you as a professional and is focused on the skills that you need at your workplace. Self growth can help improve your professional growth because it gives a good base for development.
For example, if you have a high self esteem you, are more likely to give a presentation with ease for your management team. You are more able to discuss assertively with your colleagues, maybe ask for a promotion or a raise.
There are some personal skills that can help you develop professionally. Here are a few examples:
- Time management. This is a skill that can help you focus and prioritize what is important to do in a day at home or at work.
- Finance management. This skill can help you manage your finances to reach your goals in your career.
- Conflict resolution. Managing conflicts in very important in every day life as well as at work. At work you may have conflicts or confrontations with colleagues and it may come in handy to know what to do and how to effectively overcome a tense moment.
- Emotional management. This is an important life skill that helps in any situation. It is very important to learn how to effectively manage your emotions for better relationships, wellbeing and success.
- Personal life-work balance or personal boundaries. Knowing when to stop or when it is too much for you it is an important skill to have. This skill can help you place healthy limits when needed, both in your personal life and at work. This can help keep a good personal life-work balance.
What personal development skills you can gain?
The skills you can gain by developing yourself are as many and diverse as your objectives. It only matters what your objectives are. For example, if you want to make more friends, the skill you may need is communication paired with increased self esteem. Other skills may be:
- Time management.
- Emotional management.
- Conflict management.
- Problem solving.
- Decision making.
If you want to learn about yourself, you can work on finding what your pluses and minuses are and learn to accept them. We do not only have positive or only negatives. We have both and it’s important for our confidence to know them both.
If you need to grow as a person, does it mean that you are not good enough?
If you want to develop yourself as a person, it does not mean that you are not good enough. It simply means that you have the curiosity and courage to challenge yourself and your comfort zone to know yourself better and improve yourself.
Just by contacting me or a professional for personal development sessions it does not mean that something is wrong with you. It is normal to desire to be a better person, to develop your soft-skills, and reach your goals. According to Maslow’s hierarchy, it is a need that almost everyone has. If you want to grow as a person it means that you are on top of that pyramid.
What is the difference between personal development and psychotherapy?
Personal development is different than psychotherapy because the intervention is not related to therapy, healing or integrating experiences or parts of ourselves that are hurting. Personal growth is not healing. It is reaching your goals and improving yourself, overcoming obstacles to be the best version of yourself.
You can also read about psychotherapy to see what it is and how different it is from personal development.
I want to develop myself, what should I do?
If you want to develop yourself, you are in the right place. Personal development can take place both in-person or online, depending on your needs. If you want to take steps to know yourself better in individual sessions, contact me and we can set the details together for you.
How many personal development sessions do I need?
It is very difficult to estimate the precise number of sessions. The more active and determined you are to fulfill your goals, the better. Usually, the number of sessions is estimated according to the needs and objectives of each individual. Once we determine what goals you have, I create a personal development plan for you.
Depending on this plan, we decide how many sessions are needed to achieve the objectives set. We can be very effective and reach the goals in less sessions, or depending on other factors, the goals can be achieved in more sessions. Just keep in mind it is not a fixed number but an estimate.
How much does a personal development session cost?
Visit the prices page to see the price for personal development.