In introducing this series of blogs, I referred to an element called “Personal Growth”, in researching a little more, it became clear that in many instances the term “Personal Development” is used interchangeably. Given the literature available, I have therefore opted to use Personal Development as the title and focus of this post.

Personal Development: A definition

the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and experience for the purpose of enhancing individual performance and self-perception. Personal development is led by the individual…Business Definition of Personal Development

Personal Development: Why?

There are a few reasons why I believe, and the evidence I have studied suggest, personal development is an important aspect of success and achievement.

  1. Your vision and goals may involve elements such as progressing your career, building and/or developing business, achieving some level of academic or professional qualification. Whatever it is, there is a good chance that you are going to have to learn how to do something new, develop a new skill or accumulate some new knowledge to enable you to move yourself forward and develop your capabilities. After all, it is highly unlikely that you would be setting yourself a compelling vision or supporting goals to achieve something that you already knew how to do or achieve; you’d probably already have done it.
  2. Much of the time we tend to operate on auto-pilot, our behaviours driven by our sub-concious auto-responses. We are programmed with habits, beliefs and assumptions that we have picked up and developed throughtout our lifetimes. If those have not been useful to us in achieving what we wish to, then we need to change them. In the post on Beliefs I spoke about some ways that we can change our beliefs. We may also need to develop new personal and inter-personal skills, that combined with new beliefs, will promote more useful behaviours (Self-mastery) that will support achievement
  3. With the pace of change in technology and the learning/product/service innovation that enables; if you are to keep up with them and utilise them to your advantage you need to learn about and develop skills around them . Just reflect for a moment how quickly and frequently technology is moving. If you are not keeping up with these movements you will be left behind.

… a business is like a tree, its either growing or dying… it cannot stand still…Brad Sugars

There are a multitude of resources and ways in which you can gain access to information and skills to develop yourself. Some will be delivered as websites, audio files, videos or downloadable books. There are printed books, CD/DVD sets, courses delivered by television; the list goes on. You have many choices and you can choose the delivery method that best suits your learning preferences.

And… of course there is always the opportunity to call upon the skills and knowledge of other people, which is a subject we will cover in the next post

World Population Growth
Creative Commons License photo credit: Ryan Somma