A lot of people try to “do” personal development, but the majority don’t know what it is. Last week, I wrote here that I’m a man on a mission to change that. Why? Because I believe “not knowing what it is” is the primary reason so many people don’t get results from what their personal development efforts.
When we have a context for something we are doing, we can do it better and faster. Further, we stand a better chance of improvising and adjusting appropriately when things inevitably go wrong. And things do go wrong, right?
When we lack context, we lack understanding. There’s another word for a lack of understanding: ignorance. Ignorance doesn’t mean we are stupid: it simply means we don’t know something. I’ll be honest, I thought I was “doing” personal development decades ago. And I made oh-so-little-real progress. I was ignorant. Well-intentioned and enthusiastic! But ignorant.
In this post, let’s take the first step of defining what personal development is. In the upcoming posts of this series, we will tease this out in several illuminating ways. Four, to be exact. But in this post, we should start with a basic orientation, and this working definition…
PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT DEFINED
How Wikipedia defines personal development…
“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.”
Not bad. A good, general starting place. Now, let’s sharpen it. If you reflect on the above, you may see there are perhaps three aspects of personal development–increasing certain skills, gaining additional insight, and developing certain attributes or capacities. These three things can be simplified to two things.
When you do real personal development, you are doing one of two things (and sometimes both). You are adding to your technical knowledge (skills) and/or you are adding to your self-knowledge (insight, attributes, capacities).
Technical knowledge arises from learning to do something that you don’t know how to do, where that something requires no real change in who you are in order to be able to do it. In other words, your mindset, or how you see the world, or how you feel about yourself or the situation, requires no change. You just need new skills, and applying them is not overly challenging to you.
For example, you may not know how to delegate. Someone can teach you delegation, and if you are capable of doing it (emotionally, mentally, and physically), then off you go. Another example is maybe you are not so good at handling money. Maybe it runs through your hands like water through a sieve. Someone can teach you about money and how to handle it, and if you are then capable of doing it, then off you go.
In these situations, you simply need to become informed. You were missing needed information.
The tricky part, of course, is:
“…and if you are capable of doing it (mentally, emotionally, and physically), then off you go.”
For example, if deep down you fear that if you delegate you will have less value, or someone else will screw it up and make you look bad, or that you will become replaceable, etc., no amount of delegation instruction will solve that for you. You know how, and yet you cannot.
If deep down you don’t believe it is right to have money, or feel that possessing this shiny object that spending this money will bring to you is going to make you feel good in a lasting way, no amount of training on how to manage money is going to help you. You know how, and yet you cannot.
In these situations, becoming informed is not enough: you also must be transformed.
Self-knowledge is knowledge of yourself. For example, if your desire to delegate is trumped by underlying fear and anxiety, to gain knowledge of yourself might mean things such as:
- You would come to know and understand the underlying fear and anxiety.
- You would learn to work with the fear and anxiety, and to act in spite of them.
- You would learn what triggers these, and how to work with those triggers.
- You would befriend all the assumptions you make about the awful things that will happen when you delegate, and you’d separate out the truth from the distortions through testing the assumptions.
- You would learn how it feels in your body (physical) to delegate in spite of your fears and anxieties (emotion), and in spite of the beliefs and assumptions (mental) you have about delegating.
- You’d learn, you’d change, you’d become more capable, and you would possess more self-knowledge than you possess today.
- Tying this back to the above–you’d gain insight and develop certain attributes and capacities you don’t possess in adequate quantities today.
Self-knowledge results in a new configuration of who you are physically, emotionally, and mentally. That’s the transformation part. You don’t think the same. You don’t feel the same. You don’t see the same. You don’t act the same. And people sense it, see it, and notice it. When you couple this internal transformation with the appropriate external information, you are able to delegate. Or handle your money better. Or whatever it is that you want to do.
THE #1 MISTAKE
The biggest mistake we make is thinking all that we lack is technical knowledge. To a degree that would surprise you (seriously), there is a part of all of us (including you and me) that believes when we intellectually grasp something this automatically enables us to do it, and also means we will do it. Said differently…
The biggest mistake we make is approaching our most vexing challenges and important goals and aspirations as though they are solely technical challenges. This is the reason many, many attempted organizational transformations and personal change efforts fail. We’ve got this huge, whopping blind spot that keeps us from seeing that we lack self-knowledge and need to cultivate more of it. There’s a simple name for this blind spot, too.
Self-deception. We believe we are already capable when we are not. We believe technical knowledge will save the day, when in fact it is only one part of the solution.
Self-deception thus trumps self-knowledge again and again. Until we see our greatest challenges and most wondrous aspirations primarily as calls to transform into bigger and better versions of ourselves, and secondarily as opportunities to become more informed, solving those challenges and moving towards those aspirations is like chasing the end of a rainbow. You never get there, though it can make for a grand and exciting adventure.
TRUE PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT PRODUCES SELF-KNOWLEDGE
I hope it is becoming clear that personal development includes being transformed and not solely becoming informed. Transformation involves changing your physical, emotional, and mental aspects… individually, and collectively (the way they work together). This is a probably bigger deal than you think it is. A much bigger deal.
Gaining self-knowledge changes how you feel, think, and see yourself, others, and the world around you. Sounds groovy, but this isn’t all confetti, roses, chocolate, and champagne. (Yikes!)
True personal development — and the self-knowledge that comes with it — can shake up your world temporarily. Sometimes it can feel like the things that once were solid reference points start moving this way and that. A client once said to me, “It feels right now like I have no solid ground to stand on.” It can be that way, until you re-orient yourself. And you will re-orient yourself. Those physical, emotional, and mental changes will “seat” in a new, more expansive, better way.
And remember, you are the boss. You decide how far, how fast, and how deep you want to go. Personal development doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Far from it. There’s a middle way, and you get to choose yours. There’s the old adage, “No pain, no gain.” And, another one of my favorites, “There’s no growth in the comfort zone, and no comfort in the growth zone.” All this, in my experience, is true. Yet you get to decide how much pain or discomfort you want to tolerate in order to get the gains and benefits you desire. And the benefits of suffering some discomfort are amazing…
THE KEY BENEFIT OF PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
So why on earth would you subject yourself to the pain and discomfort of the deeper levels of personal development? Why not stay on the sofa with a good leadership or self-help book and simply read about it? Fair question!
Self-knowledge brings freedom. Yup, all the “hard” things above are true. Your world can get a little wobbly for a bit. It’s uncomfortable. It requires discipline. But there’s good news. And anyone can have the good news. What’s the good news?
“Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
John 8:32
The deeper levels of personal development–the levels that involve some pain and discomfort–help you see the truth. You roll back self-deception, false assumptions, unsubstantiated anxieties, and misguided instincts and impulses. And that truth will set you free. How so?
Today, you have no idea how constricted your world is. You think you are free. You have the illusion of being free. Yet you are only relatively free. This notion can be really hard to swallow! Yet you will likely see that your current anxieties and fears (emotion), your current beliefs and assumptions (mental), and the way those work in your body and produce action (physical), place very real constraints on you that you cannot see, that you are not fully aware of. You are free, to a degree. And that degree is much, much less than you believe.
Time to re-watch some movies (or see them for the first time)! The Truman Show, Groundhog Day, and The Matrix. All are great metaphors for this constriction… and for the illusion that we are free when in fact we are not fully free. These movies resonate with us for a reason: there’s truth in them! And they remind us of the greatest storyline of all… The Hero’s Journey, popularized by Joseph Campbell.
Gaining more freedom basically means that you are more free to be, to live, and to act in better alignment with who you truly are and to what life actually is. There is an aspect of you beyond your body, beyond your emotions, and beyond your thoughts. It’s that part of you that can observe and to a degree manage all three of those other aspects. And this fourth aspect of you hasn’t been getting a fair shake. In fact, it has trouble ringing through. (“ET, phone home.”) It has been waiting on you to gain some semblance of balance among – and regulation of – your physical, emotional, and mental aspects so it can… shine. So…
“Shine on, you crazy diamond.”
–Pink Floyd
THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH
Personal development means stripping away what you are not. (That’s the death & rebirth part reflected in The Hero’s Journey image, above.) This transformation is not additive, it is subtractive. Basically, as you transform, you are stripping away the grip of unwarranted anxieties, misinformed beliefs, misguided instincts, societal programming, and the like. You aren’t adding anything. You are returning to who and what you truly are — and have always been — at your core.
You don’t strip things away by reading about it. This is, by far, is the most inconvenient truth. Reading is easy, and this is why the technical knowledge approach is so popular. You can get informed by reading… and listening, watching, modeling, or whatever. Result? Bazillions of books and trainings and what-not on leadership development, personal development, self-help, relationships, etc. etc. A multibillion dollar business (no exaggeration) with very, very low return on investment (for the buyers). And, paradoxically, the buyers can’t seem to get enough of what they are being sold.
You gain self-knowledge through disciplined practice and taking actions that are at times really uncomfortable. What! Do you mean there’s no app for this? That is correct. There is no app, no book, no workshop, no nothing that is going to strip away that which is not you. Only you can do that. It takes a combination of daily practice and situational “tests” of the validity of your instincts, anxieties, and assumptions. You don’t have to do it alone, but it is DIY.
THE GOOD NEWS!
Personal development isn’t easy, but the incredible rewards lie somewhere on the other side of the limits of your imagination. Your current imagination is limited — circumscribed — by your current physical, emotional, and mental aspects and the way they work together (or not). Therefore, you can only see so far – right now at least. But that changes. With each step down the path of your personal development journey, you gain a keener sense of who you are, who others are, and what life is and how it works. And you gain the capacity to be true to that and to act in alignment with that knowledge. Sounds groovy? It is.
The benefits of true personal development aren’t just hard to imagine, they are priceless. You become a bigger and better version of yourself. You become more capable of taking the right action. You become more capable of unconditional love and compassion. You become more capable of truly serving others and life. And, sure, your business goals and working with others to achieve them become easier. Because you finally realize what the problem is, and always has been. And, therefore, you can do something about it.
Therefore, as a mentor of mine once said, “Self-knowledge is power.” Self-knowledge is powerbecause you realize that while you are only ONE in seven billion, ONE is a very powerful number indeed.
PULLING IT TOGETHER
In this post, we’ve covered a lot…
- Wikipedia’s definition of personal development.
- True personal development involves both technical knowledge and self-knowledge.
- Self-knowledge is knowledge of yourself.
- Gaining self-knowledge transforms us physically, emotionally, and mentally.
- Transformation can feel a little wobbly and uncomfortable at times.
- The benefit of self-knowledge — and therefore personal development — is freedom.
- It is the embodiment of The Hero’s Journey, in real life.
- The price of self-knowledge is disciplined practice and taking uncomfortable action.
- Self-knowledge is priceless, and is what you gain through personal development.
NEXT UP
This post serves as a basic orientation to personal development, which is the process of gaining not just information, but transformation. Of gaining self-knowledge. Now that we have this very basic foundation, there are some really, really cool things to cover. I call them the four scenic overlooks…
I haven’t defined personal development here as much as I’ve pointed to it. It’s a big thing. And you can’t grasp it using your intellect alone. So, I’m inviting you to walk around this thing with me. At each overlook, we will look at this big thing called personal development from four perspectives. My goal? Yes, to inform you. There’s some research and science behind it, yes. But also, my purpose is to convey a feeling for what personal development actually is — how it might feel, who you might become, and what you might be capable of should you take this journey, my hero.
Having a feeling for where you are headed — as you may find — is quite handy in the journey of transformation… for transformation is as much (or more) a matter of the heart as it is of the head.
Make it a good week!
Otis
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P.P.S. There is a prior post in this series: My Mission: To Help You Better Understand Personal Development