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What is personal development?

People are born to learn and improve themselves. From the moment we are born we start to learn about the world and how to interact with it. Everything is a new adventure to us with colours, sounds, tastes, textures, etc. all being experienced for the very first time. These experiences continue through childhood and form an important part of the growing experience.

During the early part of childhood personal development is easy. All around us is a world of new experiences and all we have to do is to move around in it to learn new things every day. Before going to school there seems little point in structuring personal development because we have enough to be getting on with through simply living.

During the next stage of childhood we benefit from a more structured approach and we gain experience of relating to others and teachers make sure we learn enough about the world for a full experience of life. We learn the languages we need to communicate with others and learn some pretty amazing things that others have discovered about our world.

Then we grow through adolescence and into early adulthood and we continue to learn both through life experiences and with the guidance of others more experienced than ourselves.

Of course our parents play a vital role through all of this as we gain much of our experience of the world through their eyes, they help us make sense of life by interpreting it to us. If you are a parent I encourage you to remember this because how your children interact with the world will depend a great deal on what they learn through you.

During this whole experience it is possible for our personal development to become a little lopsided. Some of us will not be able to experience all life has to offer during childhood and our view of the world is very narrow. Some of us will have some very bad experiences that will spoil some of the world to us. Some of us will have no boundaries through which we experience life and we can become very self focused and believe the world exists only for us. Some of us will miss out on sports or we might be denied a good spiritual life or we might not get the education that we could have benefited from. These are all big issues but sadly not for us to explore in this article (this article would be a book if we did).

So we reach adulthood. The thrill of our early life experiences has generally passed and new sensations are few and far between. The vast wealth of learning that is provided for us through schools now must be sought out if we want access to it. All that running around and playing games tends to become sitting around and watching. Our imaginations get swamped with logic and being sensible. Our spiritual lives get relegated to the occasional walk or watching a sunset during a holiday. As adults we get access to all kinds of things that seem exciting when we are young but that turn out to be life destroying as we get older.

So we come to answer our question of what is personal development?

Well personal development is not about going back to our childhood. Childhood is for children and as we grow older the world that we live in takes on a different light. However there is something about being childlike that is important throughout life. The childlike qualities of wonder and excitement should never be neglected.

Personal development is about realising that at some point in our life we will change from the world having an effect on us to us having an effect on the world. At some point we will have to take control. Life is not about letting it all happen to us – as it does in childhood – but instead life must mean taking an active part in how we interact with the world.

In a simple way this means taking control of how we develop as people. We must take control of how and what we learn; we must take control of how we experience new things and learn to seek those new experiences out; we must take control of how and when we experience the spiritual; we must learn that our physical self needs to be exercised and used.

How do we take control? By having a plan. We must take time to take stock of our lives and then make a plan for what we are going to do. We must move from being passive receivers of the world to be active controllers of our part of the world.

I think this is exciting. As adults we have such potential to do amazing things. So we learn to dream about the amazing things we could do and then we start to set goals to achieve them.

Personal development is about taking control of your self and making sure that your ability to grow as a person is headed in the right direction. It involves understanding that the ability to learn new things does not diminish through our life but that at some point the ability to learn needs guidance. It means understanding that now you are an adult your life is not controlled by someone else or by basic experiences but is instead controlled by you. Life is what you make it – what will you make yours?

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