Is Personal Development Really Necessary?

It seems everything you read these days about health and well-being somehow relates back to Personal Development. It’s often called personal growth, self development, self awareness, maybe enlightenment and a whole lot of other fashionable names that arose in the mainstream sometime over the past few decades.

Some people take to personal development like a fish takes to water and others come to it with great resistance, only as a last ditch attempt to put some area of their lives in order after a crisis. Others become downright personal development junkies paying large sums of money for the latest, greatest seminar being taught by a person who (allegedly) has all the answers.

Personal Development has been around for eons. You just have to Google the old Philosophers like Socrates and Plato etc and they were pretty much talking about how to become a better person and improve your life. But what does it mean in our modern age? What are the advantages and disadvantages of becoming a personally developed human?  Why bother?

Well the bad news is, if you don’t take care of your own life and your grasp of how to live it happily, some seemingly “magical” force appears to take control of it for you! As a Stress Management Counselor for over 20 years, I saw it happen time and time again. People would come to me wanting help with a certain situation that was causing them bother and I would regularly discover that they were stuck, didn’t really want to change and just hoping the situation would somehow right itself without them taking part at all. They came to me wanting a quick fix and hopefully find that it was all someone else’s fault! I’d painstakingly work out a program of change for them, taking things gently and I was quite often stunned and amazed at how they still wouldn’t do a thing, preferring instead to suffer the problem that was bothering them and disrupting their lives so much. Sometimes I wouldn’t see that person again for some time but eventually they would reappear and guess what? Their problem had grown and turned into a chaotic, painful, stressful and even more life disrupting situation. That magical force of nature had worked on them and  the job they hated and wanted to change (but were too stuck and frightened to take action on) they were fired from. The relationship they no longer wanted to be in had become a tragedy of Greek proportions and their partner had left with their best friend leaving them in financial difficulty and suffering from feelings of great rejection. I’ve called this bad news because if we would just take appropriate action when we first begin to feel those stirrings of needing to change, we would regularly avoid further stress and a worse situation to deal with.

The good new of practicing an ongoing openness to personal development is that awareness is priceless! If you observe yourself and how you operate in the world, preferably without harsh judgement, you will notice that there are certain things about yourself that you’d be better off changing. You can’t obtain financial freedom if your attitude towards money sucks. You won’t be happy and fulfilled if you are continually grumpy and negative at the world around you. We usually hang out with and attract like minded people so if you’re ok with someone just like yourself, then go ahead and stay the way you are, but if you admire people with more than you in health, money, personality, success, wisdom, intelligence, happiness etc. then maybe a bit of personal development to improve yourself wouldn’t go astray?

There’s a gentle art to personal development. It’s not about pushing yourself hard and beating yourself up for not getting things right and it’s not about ‘going with the flow’ and letting some mythical being take care of it all for you, but its all about self awareness and following (as best as possible) a plan of action as to how you’re going to be who you want to be, have what you want to have and do what you want to do with the rest of your life. So importantly, it’s about progress and not perfection.

Personal development as a jargon and trend, to me, is pretty much a waste of time, but quiet contemplation and introspection is not only invaluable, but essential if you’re to enjoy life and get to the end of each day looking forward to waking up on the next one.

In my humble opinion and with somewhat developed experience of lacking awareness and not taking action at the best time, personal development goes a long way to ensure that Every Day Gets Better.