“The swiftest way to triple your success is to double your investment in personal development.” – Robin Sharma 

There will never be a perfect time to start investing in your personal growth if you’ve been thoroughly seeking the right time to turn the keys on, now is the best time to do so. Personal development, which is also known as self-improvement, is inarguably one of the trending terms you’ll find buzzing in the social environment. In this world we live in, there’s a lot of emphasis and value placed on education. Right since when we were kids, we were made to connect to the relevance of schooling, and from our elementary school days, we’re enjoined to pursue a course in the university and some even go further to get an advanced certificate.

Nevertheless, while education is indeed significant, not all people seek learning, continuous development, and growth in diverse spheres of their lives. Most people who fall in this category succumb to living without consciousness of self-improvement when they find themselves immersed in the workforce. Several professionals and successful business people you meet today commit themselves to learning and never stop doing so and this learning isn’t about preparing for boards or pursuing continuing education.

One cannot shrug off the significance of personal growth and self-improvement because of how immensely estimable they are and their involvement in diverse areas of your life, which also includes your career.

What is Personal Growth?

Personal growth can be explained to be the act of a person becoming more conscious of who he or she is as a whole, which leads to taking actionable steps in attending to habits, actions, values, attitudes, and behaviors that need to be worked on and changed. The awareness of the ‘self’ is the first stage of the process because this is what enables the individual to have an honest and unadulterated view of who they are, and with this self-awareness comes the need to make specific changes that will affect the individual’s life positively.

Another definition given to personal growth is that it’s the act of self-introspection that concentrates on how one can be better. Some experts have also defined it as a practice of inner work that involves looking inward deeply with the aim of achieving a specific result in the course of finding passion, purpose, and clarity. Personal growth or personal development, as it may be called, implicates all the spheres of your life where you thirst to grow, and it helps in fulfilling your aspirations and increasing your skills, self-esteem, and self-awareness.

What Constitutes Personal Growth and Development?

The process of making changes to the self and committing to growth can be either complex or simple and this is usually influenced by the individual’s wants and needs. While some people tend to pursue personal development so that they can improve a specific thing or area in their lives, some see it as a lifelong project of self-improvement.

Some people also tend to approach personal growth differently by working with a friend, parent, personal trainer, lecturer, business partner, mentor or role model, doctor, dietician, physical therapist, counselor, or just anybody at all who can offer them valuable insights and opinions they can act on. To sum it all up, personal growth can involve lots of different things and people often choose to approach a unique process they find to be more suitable, but regardless of whatever process followed, it’s a journey of intention with lots of attached actions.

Who is Personal Growth and Development for?

Personal growth and development isn’t specially designed for some special set of people. Regardless of whatever your color, size, or identity is, you can oblige to personal growth. In fact, it’s something I believe everyone needs to embrace because there are lots of things to profit from becoming better. But even so, do you know that some sets of persons have a chance of benefiting more from personal growth than other average persons? Yes, actually. As proven by experts, people who have difficulties that implicate them in recurrent conflicts or pain can benefit more from personal growth.

Examples include those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other trauma-related issues, disabilities, injury rehabilitation, mental health challenges, behavioral difficulties, pain management, and physical injuries, among others. Basically, you can choose to work on yourself and get better if you want to but this is more urgent and needed for individuals going through difficulties that can only be straightened when they get some things right about their ‘selves’.

When Personal Growth Becomes Painful…

Most of the time, a lot of people don’t decide to pursue personal growth just because they woke up one day and choose to. There are several people whose yearning for self-improvement and personal growth was triggered by a tragic or painful life event that occurred. And, what makes this more painful is when the person in this case reflects and realizes that s/he could have reacted or behaved differently and this would have averted the sad occurrence. Another scenario may be when the individual becomes more conscious of a particular negative behavioral pattern that has been having a direct impact on how they act and even their inactions.

Areas of Personal Development

Speaking of personal growth and development, there are five distinct areas of your life that you must commit to.

• Mental

Your personal development is incomplete if you leave your mental growth out of it. It’s crucial to stay mentally fit and exercise your brain. You can do this through career growth, learning opportunities, and even coaching. A simple way to keep your mental creative muscles active is by taking a course online. You may also look at training sessions and workshops as they both offer opportunities for mental development too. Rest is also important for mental health because it contributes to your health in the long run.

• Social

You cannot speak of personal growth without including relationships and social connections. As a matter of fact, the pursuit of self-improvement isn’t one that’s done solitarily. For us to learn and grow, it’s important for us to form connections because we’re social creatures as humans. We derive vital skills through social connections and these skills include your capacity to give and receive feedback, relationship-building, problem-solving, and communication skills. Your social interaction with others also provides learning opportunities from life’s experiences and the people that surround you.

• Spiritual

Spirituality is a vital aspect of our lives that we cannot relegate to the back seat, even though it’s something a lot of people tend to care less about, unfortunately. Whether you consider yourself religious or not, your spirituality plays a great role in your personal development and growth. Speaking of this, it’s vital that you know that spirituality and religion are two different things. As shown by studies, spirituality helps to bring you to a state of greater awareness of yourself, reveals your values, and guides you to the path of change.

• Emotional

Emotional intelligence shares a very close relationship with emotional personal growth. In a very simple explanation, your ability to understand feelings is determined by your level of emotional intelligence. Aside from feelings, it also cuts across having a better knowledge of how our actions and thoughts are shaped by these feelings. In the pursuit of self-improvement, you must seek emotional personal growth.

• Physical

For you to have a healthy mind, you need a healthy body. You see, the way we function as a human is that our emotional, mental, and physical well-being are intrinsically connected. This means that whatever happens to your emotional state can affect you mentally and/or physically. And likewise, whatever happens to you physically can impact your emotional and/or mental state.

For instance, if you feel sad, you’ll feel weak to walk and you’ll not be in the right spirit to think. More so, if you’re ill, you may find it difficult to think. Your physical health revolves around areas like movement, exercise, sleep, and nutrition. Your mind is a strong benefactor of a nourished physical self and this is why it’s very important that you keep fit and don’t neglect your physical improvement while you’re pursuing personal growth.

From engaging in a fun exercise like cycling or working your feet through hiking, there are series of enjoyable workouts you can explore. If you want to enjoy your workouts even more pleasurable, you should consider crafting the best workout playlist for your fitness experience.

Why Personal Growth Is Important

A 2021 333-page report by Research and Markets revealed that about more than 10 billion dollars were raked in by self-improvement products in the United States. This goes to show how massive and relevant self-improvement is, especially in our today’s world where people are becoming increasingly aware of the necessity to become better as we keep setting resolutions that gear us to read faster, increase productivity, be a better salesperson, improve our relationships, lose weight, and lots more. Regardless of your age, personal growth is vital, and here are some of the benefits you stand to enjoy from it;

• Healthier Relationships

Relationships are at the core of everything we do and how we function in the social space. Whether you like it or not, there’s a relationship that will exist with your boss, your colleagues, your lover, your children, your family, your friends, and your neighbors. And thankfully, there are different adjectives that are used to specify the level and closeness of relationships you have with people.

In fact, you also can’t escape a relationship with yourself because the way you treat yourself will always count. Now, you’re bound to have a low-quality life if you have low-quality relationships. On the other hand, the quality of your life can improve if you have vibrant and healthy relationships. In personal development, one vital skill is learning to build and maintain good relationships. You’re bound to enjoy more pleasing satisfaction in your relationships when you build interpersonal skills.

• Less Stress

The American Institute of Stress says that “stress is a hell of a state of mind” and according to a 2017 study by Yaribeygi et al., people working or living in stressful environments or are exposed to stress are vulnerable to an array of pathophysiological complications of disease and even death. With personal development, you can reduce stress to the barest minimum and enjoy living a healthy life of little or no stress through the incorporation of stress-reduction techniques as a habit of personal development.

• Improved Health

When you look at the two points that have been earlier mentioned, you’ll agree that truly, one enjoys better health with personal development. The relationship with stress remains obvious because more disease is what you get from more stress. And, you do have less stress to deal with when you have healthier and happier relationships. This means that our health becomes better when we find a way to reduce our stress levels.

• Increased Productivity

Deeper emotions are the usual drivers of procrastination and you’ll agree with me that procrastination is the principal adversity of productivity. People who put themselves through the process of personal development have a high tendency of enjoying higher productivity. Plus, they become more more aware of motivators and hidden emotions that help them manage stress better and increase their level of focus.

• Enhanced Self-control

The way you regulate your behavior, thoughts, and emotions so that you can achieve your goals is through self-control. Our underlying emotions and subconscious beliefs tend to drive impulses, habits, and temptations that want to derail us whenever we have a goal we’re planning to achieve. The beauty of personal growth is that embodying it helps to fortify your level of self-control and recognize underlying feelings and beliefs.

• Greater Success

When you’re working on yourself as a person who’s committed to self-growth, it’s only natural that you’ll enjoy greater success. I mean, one can only look forward to being successful because of the enabling environment that will be created by enhanced self-control, increased productivity, reduced stress, and healthy relationships.

• Better Parenting

Well, currently, I’m not a parent yet so, I’m not in the best position to give you tips on better parenting but I can tell you confidently that your parenting can be significantly improved through personal growth. The thing is, if you do not develop and work on yourself as a caregiver or as a parent, you’re clearly not setting the standards and modeling the right attitudes for your babies and children who will always copy what you do.

Look at yourself keenly and honestly and ask if you’re being that good first role model for your kids. You’ll be helping your kids not to pick up negative behaviors and patterns from you with the time you spend on self-awareness and personal growth. More so, this will help to significantly reduce your tendency of falling into regular parenting pitfalls like micromanaging, enabling, bullying, anger, negative reinforcement, and others.

• Greater Happiness

Thinking of it, what’s there not to be happy about? Imagine a life where personal growth is effected and you now enjoy the dividends of it such as better health, improved peace of mind, a loving family, better productivity level, and better productivity, among others, you’ll definitely be glad that your life is changing for better and the fact that you now manage your relationships and life better will indeed be gladdening.

The efforts you make in the spirit of self-improvement help in the recognition, healing, and transformation of self-sabotaging habits and behaviors including underlying traumas and beliefs. The result of all of these is happiness that comes along with an improved and healthier self-esteem.

• Greater Resilience

This is the grand finale of the benefits of personal growth and growth development. How personal development helps you build your resilience is that it furnishes you with the capacity to confidently deal with challenges from the inside and out. Your level of resilience can be directly and positively impacted through the coping strategies, self-awareness, and emotional and social intelligence you develop through personal development.

Steps to Develop a Personal Development Plan

When you have a goal, it’s very vital that you come up with a plan because a goal without a plan will only remain what it is, which is a mere goal. The same also applies to personal development. You need to have a structure in place that will help make your goals become a reality. Here are simple steps to take to develop your personal development plan.

• Identify

This is the first thing you must do. You need to ask yourself the areas where improvements are needed. For you to do this successfully, you may need to do some thorough reflections. Think of the growth you seek in yourself, the areas you desire to concentrate on, your strengths, and where you’re right now.

• Assemble a Plan

Most of the time, a lot of people who find it difficult to frame a plan prefer to work with a mentor or a life coach, or even any other support system they can lean on. It’s not mandatory that you must do it alone. You’ll find yourself well-equipped to take actionable steps with the plans you’ve come up with when there’s the right structure.

• Structure Your Goals

One of the mistakes a lot of people make is that they come up with lots of goals and they end up becoming disoriented and disorganized. The relevance of setting a goal is to have an established routine, stay consistent, and constantly examine how you’re doing. Make sure your personal development goals are well-structured so that they’ll be effective.

• Find an Accountability Buddy

A great way to be committed to your personal development goals is by working with an accountability buddy, someone who can check on you to see if you’re still on the path or if you’ve digressed. A whole lot of difference can be made when you have someone holding you accountable and you can also use this as an opportunity to lean and rub positivity on each other.

• Be Honest and Conscious

Without integrity, your personal development plan will fail woefully. There’s an African proverb that says that “If the person who’s being lied to doesn’t know he’s being lied to, the person who’s lying definitely knows he’s lying.” If you’re not honest with how you’re growing and progressing, you’re only fooling yourself. Besides honesty, you also need to know how you’re fairing. Seek insights and feedback from your colleagues, family, and friends to know how you’re doing.