Personal Development

Personal development happens in different ways to different people. It takes a different meaning depending on each individual’s life circumstances. Working towards personal development involves overcoming psychological, emotional and/or background obstacles. It makes us grow and leave behind past attitudes that were keeping you stuck in a place instead of getting ahead in our lives. It makes you feel alive and vibrant, willing to try new things and increase your self-confidence.

When you start to discover how to see things from a different perspective, it becomes possible to grow and move forward. From time to time we all get stuck in chronic situations and viewpoints that create suffering. We can’t see other perspectives, consider new ideas or create movement from them. We cannot see a solution for a problem that seems to be existential. However, there is always a way. Through finding new meanings and changing our behaviour, we change the way we feel about others, the future and ourselves. There are various ways to achieve this. In this blog, we will focus on a specific way of achieving personal change.

How does it look like to work towards Personal Development in counselling?

You can choose the areas of your life you want to focus for your development. You may choose these areas because you are not satisfied where you are and you want to do better. The goals for personal development are usually related to:

What is a Personal Development counselling plan?

For a busy working person, personal development may involve spending time doing activities to refresh and replenish their energy, to feel alive again instead of feeling the sense of doom that comes from rushing to meet deadlines and demands. For example, it could mean to start spending time in nature, doing exercise, meditation and finding time to see friends.

For a grieving individual, it could be to be able to find new meaning to the loss, internalize the good memories of the loved one and be able to establish relationships with others and feel they have the right to be excited and happy again after the loss.

For an individual with a mental health disorder, it could be to live their life based on his/her values rather than on the impulses of their mood swings and dysfunctional behaviour. In terms of goals, this could be to replace the yelling at family members with going for a walk or to be compassionate to others instead of aggressive.

A plan for personal development consists of 5 steps.

What is your goal? What would you like to achieve?

For example, you want to have more time to stop living automatic pilot and enjoy your life. You want to be present in the midst of your busy schedule and daily responsibilities.

You can plan to increase your steps daily, weekly, biweekly or with the frequency that you feel is realistic for you. If you are planning to introduce a new habit into your life, it’s easier to start with a short period of time but do it daily and increase the time as the days go by. Each new day of practice will usually feel easier to do the new activity than the day before. You can use this method for studying, exercising, working and doing any activity you would like to start doing.

GOALS: Goals have to be SMART.

SMART stands for:

SPECIFIC: one at a time (play 30 minutes a day with my children)

MEASURABLE: 30 minutes a day by the end of the month

ACHIEVABLE: Can you accomplish this change in 2 weeks or do you need a month to adjust your schedule? Plan for success. Better slower but sure.

REALISTIC: Can you take 30 minutes a day to devote completely to your children? If the answer is no, go for 10 minutes.

TIME LIMITED: Want to try this for a month and see how it goes? Maybe after a month, you want to try a different way of bonding with your children and take them out twice a week or create a special family tradition to do over dinner such as talking about what made them happy during the day.

If you feel excited about working towards your personal development, go for it! Start by identifying the areas in your life that you could do better by your own standards and values. Then define your goal. You can have goals for different areas of your life such as family relationships, career, free time, etc.

Then go through the SMART goals plan to define them. Plan a series of steps to get from where you are now to where you want to be.

Start taking the steps one at a time. Enjoy your personal development!