Personal development covers activities that improve awareness and identity, develop talents and potential, build human capital and facilitate employability, enhance the quality of life and contribute to the realization of dreams and aspirations. Personal development takes place over the course of a person's entire life. Not limited to self-help, the concept involves formal and informal activities for developing others in roles such as teacher, guide, counselor, manager, life coach or mentor. When personal development takes place in the context of institutions, it refers to the methods, programs, tools, techniques, and assessment systems that support human development at the individual level in organizations.
Overview
Inter alia, personal development may include the following activities:
- improving self-awareness
- improving self-knowledge
- improving skills and/or learning new ones
- building or renewing identity/self-esteem
- developing strengths or talents
- improving a career
- identifying or improving potential
- building employability or (alternatively) human capital
- enhancing lifestyle and/or the quality of life and time management
- improving health
- improving wealth or social status
- fulfilling aspirations
- initiating a life enterprise
- defining and executing personal development plans (PDPs)
- improving social relations or emotional intelligence
Personal development can also include developing other people. This may take place through roles such as those of a teacher or mentor, either through a personal competency (such as the skill of certain managers in developing the potential of employees) or through a professional service (such as providing training, assessment or coaching).
Beyond improving oneself and developing others, "personal development" labels a field of practice and research. As a field of practice, it includes personal development methods, learning programs, assessment systems, tools, and techniques.
As a field of research, personal development topics appear in psychology journals, education research, management journals and books, and human development economics.
Any sort of developmentâ€"whether economic, political, biological, organisational or personalâ€"requires a framework if one wishes to know whether a change has actually occurred. In the case of personal development, an individual often functions as the primary judge of improvement or of regression, but validation of objective improvement requires assessment using standard criteria. Personal-development frameworks may include goals or benchmarks that define the end-points, strategies or plans for reaching goals, measurement, and assessment of progress, levels or stages that define milestones along a development path, and a feedback system to provide information on changes.
As an industry
Personal development as an industry has several business relationship formats of operating. The main ways are business-to-consumer and business-to-business. However, there are two newer ways increasing in prevalence: consumer-to-business and consumer-to-consumer.
Business-to-consumer market
The business-to-consumer market involves selling books, courses and techniques to individuals, such as:
- newly invented offerings such as:
- fitness
- beauty enhancement
- weight loss
- traditional practices such as:
- yoga
- martial arts
- meditation
Some programs are delivered online and many include tools sold with a program, such as motivational books for self-help, recipes for weight-loss or technical manuals for yoga and martial-arts programs.
A partial list of personal development offerings on the business-to-individual market might include:
- books
- motivational speaking
- e-Learning programs
- workshops
- individual counseling
- life coaching
- Time Management
Business-to-business market
The business-to-business market also involves programs â€" in this case ones sold to companies and to governments to assess potential, to improve effectiveness, to manage work-life balance or to prepare some entity for a new role in an organization. The goals of these programs are defined with the institution or by the institution and the results are assessed. Universities and business schools also contract programs to external specialist firms or to individuals.
A partial list of business-to-business programs might include:
- marketing and market development
- time management
- courses and assessment systems for higher education organizations for their students
- management services to employees in organizations through:
- training
- training and development programs
- personal-development tools
- self-assessment
- feedback
- business coaching
- mentoring
Some consulting firms specialize in personal development but as of 2009 generalist firms operating in the fields of human resources, recruitment and organizational strategy have entered what they perceive as a growing market, not to mention smaller firms and self-employed professionals who provide consulting, training and coaching.
Additionally, the International Association for Personal Development Professionals (IAPDP), an international trade group launched in 2013 to support professionals in the self-help industry.
Origins
Major religions â€" such as the Abrahamic and Indian religions â€" as well as New Age philosophies have used practices such as prayer, music, dance, singing, chanting, poetry, writing, sports and martial arts. These practices have various functions, such as health or aesthetic satisfaction, but they may also link to "final goals" of personal development such as discovering the meaning of life or living the good life (compare philosophy).
Michel Foucault describes in Care of the Self the techniques of epimelia used in ancient Greece and Rome, which included dieting, exercise, sexual abstinence, contemplation, prayer and confessionâ€"some of which also became important practices within different branches of Christianity.
In yoga, a discipline originating in India, possibly over 3000 years ago, personal-development techniques include meditation, rhythmic breathing, stretching and postures.
"Yi"Wushu and T'ai chi ch'uan utilise traditional Chinese techniques, including breathing and energy exercises, meditation, martial arts, as well as practices linked to traditional Chinese medicine, such as dieting, massage and acupuncture.
In Islam, which arose almost 1500 years ago in the Middle East, personal-development techniques include ritual prayer, recitation of the Qur'an, pilgrimage, fasting and tazkiyah (purification of the soul).
Two individual ancient philosophers: Aristotle and the Western Tradition and Confucius and the Eastern Tradition stand out as major sources of what has become personal development in the 21st century, representing a Western tradition and an East Asian tradition. Elsewhere anonymous founders of schools of self-development appear endemic â€" note the traditions of the Indian sub-continent in this regard.
South Asian traditions
Some ancient Indians aspired to "beingness, wisdom and happiness".
Aristotle and the Western tradition
The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 BCE â€" 322 BCE) influenced theories of personal development in the West. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defined personal development as a category of phronesis or practical wisdom, where the practice of virtues (arête) leads to eudaimonia, commonly translated as "happiness" but more accurately understood as "human flourishing" or "living well". Aristotle continues to influence the Western concept of personal development to this day, particularly in the economics of human development and in positive psychology.
Confucius and the East Asian tradition
In Chinese tradition, Confucius (around 551 BCE â€" 479 BCE) founded an ongoing philosophy. His ideas continue to influence family values, education and management in China and East Asia. In his Great Learning Confucius wrote:
The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.
Contexts
Psychology
Psychology became linked to personal development in the early 20th century starting with Alfred Adler (1870â€"1937) and Carl Jung (1875â€"1961).
Adler refused to limit psychology to analysis, making the important point that aspirations look forward and do not limit themselves to unconscious drives or to childhood experiences. He also originated the concepts of lifestyle (1929â€"he defined "lifestyle" as an individual's characteristic approach to life, in facing problems) and of self image, a concept that influenced management under the heading of work-life balance.
Carl Gustav Jung made contributions to personal development with his concept of individuation, which he saw as the drive of the individual to achieve the wholeness and balance of the Self.
Daniel Levinson (1920â€"1994) developed Jung's early concept of "life stages" and included a sociological perspective. Levinson proposed that personal development come under the influenceâ€"throughout lifeâ€"of aspirations, which he called "the Dream":
Whatever the nature of his Dream, a young man has the developmental task of giving it greater definition and finding ways to live it out. It makes a great difference in his growth whether his initial life structure is consonant with and infused by the Dream, or opposed to it. If the Dream remains unconnected to his life it may simply die, and with it his sense of aliveness and purpose.
Levinson's model of seven life-stages has been considerably modified due to sociological changes in the lifecycle.
Research on success in reaching goals, as undertaken by Albert Bandura (born 1925), suggested that self-efficacy best explains why people with the same level of knowledge and skills get very different results. According to Bandura self-confidence functions as a powerful predictor of success because:
- it makes you expect to succeed
- it allows you take risks and set challenging goals
- it helps you keep trying if at first you don't succeed
- it helps you control emotions and fears when the going gets rough
In 1998 Martin Seligman won election to a one-year term as President of the American Psychological Association and proposed a new focus: on healthy individuals rather than on pathology (he created the "positive psychology" current)
We have discovered that there is a set of human strengths that are the most likely buffers against mental illness: courage, optimism, interpersonal skill, work ethic, hope, honesty and perseverance. Much of the task of prevention will be to create a science of human strength whose mission will be to foster these virtues in young people.
Higher education
Personal development has been at the heart of education in the West in the form of the Greek philosophers; and in the East with Confucius. Some people emphasize personal development as a part of higher education. Wilhelm von Humboldt, who founded the University of Berlin (since 1949: Humboldt University of Berlin) in 1810, made a statement interpretable as referring to personal development: … if there is one thing more than another which absolutely requires free activity on the part of the individual, it is precisely education, whose object it is to develop the individual.
During the 1960s a large increase in the number of students on American campuses led to research on the personal development needs of undergraduate students. Arthur Chickering defined seven vectors of personal development for young adults during their undergraduate years:
- developing competence
- managing emotions
- achieving autonomy and interdependence
- developing mature interpersonal relationships
- establishing identity
- developing purpose
- developing integrity
In the UK, personal development took a central place in university policy in 1997 when the Dearing Report declared that universities should go beyond academic teaching to provide students with personal development. In 2001 a Quality Assessment Agency for UK universities produced guidelines for universities to enhance personal development as:
* a structured and supported process undertaken by an individual to reflect upon their own learning, performance and / or achievement and to plan for their personal, educational and career development;
* objectives related explicitly to student development; to improve the capacity of students to understand what and how they are learning, and to review, plan and take responsibility for their own learning
In the 1990s, business schools began to set up specific personal-development programs for leadership and career orientation and in 1998 the European Foundation for Management Development set up the EQUIS accreditation system which specified that personal development must form part of the learning process through internships, working on team projects and going abroad for work or exchange programs.
The first personal development certification required for business school graduation originated in 2002 as a partnership between Metizo, a personal-development consulting firm, and the Euromed Management School in Marseilles: students must not only complete assignments but also demonstrate self-awareness and achievement of personal-development competencies.
As an academic department personal development has become a specific discipline, usually associated with business schools. As an area of research, personal development draws on links to other academic disciplines:
- education for questions of learning and assessment
- psychology for motivation and personality
- sociology for identity and social networks
- economics for human capital and economic value
- philosophy for ethics and self-reflection
The workplace
Abraham Maslow (1908â€"1970), proposed a hierarchy of needs with self actualization at the top, defined as:
… the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.
Since Maslow himself believed that only a small minority of people self-actualizeâ€"he estimated one percentâ€"his hierarchy of needs had the consequence that organizations came to regard self-actualization or personal development as occurring at the top of the organizational pyramid, while job security and good working conditions would fulfill the needs of the mass of employees.
As organizations and labor markets became more global, responsibility for development shifted from the company to the individual. In 1999 management thinker Peter Drucker wrote in the Harvard Business Review:
We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: if you've got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession, regardless of where you started out. But with opportunity comes responsibility. Companies today aren't managing their employees' careers; knowledge workers must, effectively, be their own chief executive officers. It's up to you to carve out your place, to know when to change course, and to keep yourself engaged and productive during a work life that may span some 50 years.
Management professors Sumantra Ghoshal of the London Business School and Christopher Bartlett of the Harvard Business School wrote in 1997 that companies must manage people individually and establish a new work contract. On the one hand the company must allegedly recognize that personal development creates economic value: "market performance flows not from the omnipotent wisdom of top managers but from the initiative, creativity and skills of all employees".
On the other hand, employees should recognize that their work includes personal development and "... embrace the invigorating force of continuous learning and personal development".
The 1997 publication of Ghoshal's and Bartlett's Individualized Corporation corresponded to a change in career development from a system of predefined paths defined by companies, to a strategy defined by the individual and matched to the needs of organizations in an open landscape of possibilities. Another contribution to the study of career development came with the recognition that women's careers show specific personal needs and different development paths from men. The 2007 study of women's careers by Sylvia Ann Hewlett Off-Ramps and On-Ramps had a major impact on the way companies view careers. Further work on the career as a personal development process came from study by Herminia Ibarra in her Working Identity on the relationship with career change and identity change, indicating that priorities of work and lifestyle continually develop through life.
Personal development programs in companies fall into two categories: the provision of employee benefits and the fostering of development strategies.
Employee benefits have the purpose of improving satisfaction, motivation and loyalty. Employee surveys may help organizations find out personal-development needs, preferences and problems, and they use the results to design benefits programs. Typical programs in this category include:
- work-life balance
- time management
- stress management
- health programs
- counseling
Many such programs resemble programs that some employees might conceivably pay for themselves outside work: yoga, sports, martial arts, money-management, positive psychology, NLP, etc.
As an investment, personal development programs have the goal of increasing human capital or improving productivity, innovation or quality. Proponents actually see such programs not as a cost but as an investment with results linked to an organization's strategic development goals. Employees gain access to these investment-oriented programs by selection according to the value and future potential of the employee, usually defined in a talent management architecture including populations such as new hires, perceived high-potential employees, perceived key employees, sales staff, research staff and perceived future leaders. Organizations may also offer other (non-investment-oriented) programs to many or even all employees. Typical programs focus on career-development, personal effectiveness, teamwork, and competency-development. Personal development also forms an element in management tools such as personal development planning, assessing one's level of ability using a competency grid, or getting feedback from a 360 questionnaire filled in by colleagues at different levels in the organization.
Criticism
Scholars have targeted self-help claims as misleading and incorrect. In 2005, Steve Salerno portrayed the American self-help movementâ€"he uses the acronym SHAM: The Self-Help and Actualization Movementâ€"not only as ineffective in achieving its goals, but also as socially harmful. 'Salerno says that 80 percent of self-help and motivational customers are repeat customers and they keep coming back whether the program worked for them or not'. Others similarly point out that with self-help books 'supply increases the demand...The more people read them, the more they think they need them...more like an addiction than an alliance'. Self-help writers have been described as working 'in the area of the ideological, the imagined, the narrativized....although a veneer of scientism permeates the[ir] work, there is also an underlying armature of moralizing'.