What is Personal Development?

Do you really know what personal development is?

Every day, I see people struggle with doing the work required to personally change. It’s my job to support people in change. But most personal development, self-help, leadership development, etc., produces no real, lasting result. That’s the inconvenient truth, and it is something I am passionate about changing.

Part of the reason personal development is so hard is due to a lack of understanding what it actually is, and what it is not.

Do people who are engaged in personal development actually know what it is? It seems like a funny question, doesn’t it? But I think it is a very important question for anyone considering personal development or actually attempting to do it. Here’s why…

Individuals and organizations spend billions of dollars every year on personal development, emotional intelligence, leadership development, and “self-help.” I’d dare say that most haven’t a clue as to what they are actually doing.

Most personal development, self-help, leadership development, etc., produces no real, lasting result.

That’s the inconvenient truth. We keep throwing good money (and time and energy) after bad, believing that we simply haven’t found the right approach, or that we are just one class short, or we haven’t found the right system, or teacher / coach / consultant / mentor, etc. We keep hunting, thinking that the next thing will be THE thing.

Want some proof personal development doesn’t work so well? Look in the literature. For example, leadership development programs produce no discernable results, according to the book, The End of Leadership, by Barbara Kellerman of Harvard University. In the seminal article (and subsequent book), “Change or Die” in Fast Company Magazine, Alan Deutschman writes that even if you have a life-threatening disease that requires a change in lifestyle… no matter how well-intentioned, enthusiastic, and successful you think you’d be in making the needed change… the odds are nine to one against you. Nine to one. So what are the odds of personal change when our life is not being threatened?

Every day, I see people struggle with doing the work required to personally change. It’s my job to support people in change. I, of course, struggle with it myself.

Look at your own self: how are you doing with becoming a bigger and better version of yourself? The hardest thing in the world is to step back and separate out our interest in something from the results that something is producing.

You — like me — probably know a lot of people who are interested in and enthusiastic about self-knowledge, emotional intelligence, self-help, leadership development, personal development or whatever you want to call it. And — like me — you probably see them having the same problems in their relationships, the same trouble with their behavior, pursuing the same old goals, making the same New Year’s Resolutions, triggered by the same things, driven by the same emotions and anxieties, trapped in the same mindset, still avoiding difficult conversations and conflict (or doing them poorly), etc., etc.

Is this personal development? No. Successful personal development yields self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is power. The power to change and to be changed. It results in an inner transformation that is reflected in the mirrors around us and in the change in our internal state of being and our way seeing life and being in the world.

Could part of our problem — our lack of true results in our personal development — be that we simply don’t know what personal development is? I think so. I want to see whether knowing what personal development is helps people change more effectively, faster, with longer lasting results. I want people to feel the internal change, and equally important, to see the changes reflected back to them in the mirrors of their life.

The reason I’m big on seeing the change externally — in our “mirrors” — is because we are all subject to that powerful capacity called self-deception. Show me a person who thinks they are making great progress — and yet nothing around them is truly and sustainably changing for the better — and I will show you a self-deceived individual.

Our mirrors don’t lie.

What happens when we do personal development without knowing what it is?

Here’s what I’m observing…

Shaky starts. If we begin our personal development efforts with an assumed understanding as to what personal development is, we are starting from shaky ground. We assume we know where we are going, we assume we know where we are, we assume we know how we will be getting there, and we assume we know what the journey will be like. Those are big assumptions that are fraught with some risk.

Uninformed choices. It is harder to decide whether to do personal development if you don’t know what it is, and personal development is not for everyone. There is a time and a place for everything, and it is not always… now. Or maybe even in this lifetime.

Lack of resilience + preparation. Without knowing what personal development actually is, we lack needed context to fortify us on our journey. This matters because on this journey we inevitably lose our way, fall down, lose heart, backslide, etc. If we don’t know what personal development is, we don’t have the reference points we need to find our bearings quickly, find heart, get up, dust off, and get going again.

Underestimation of the demands. We don’t understand that practices are required to produce the experiences we need in order to develop the capacities we lack. In fact, we don’t necessarily realize that we need to do any practices, that effort and intention are required, and that failure is part of the secret sauce. We don’t know that it is actually hard work, pushes us up against our anxieties, shakes our worldview, creates conflict and chaos as we morph… and actually requires as much or more perspiration as aspiration.
We underassess its importance. We don’t understand how important our personal development is. Oh, the power of self-deception and what social psychologists call illusory superiority. When you actually know what personal development is, it occurs to you that you probably have more work to do than you think you do, need to do it more than you believe you do, and have a greater responsibility for getting on with it than you might have contemplated.

The What & Why of Personal Development

A lot of people try to “do” personal development, but the majority don’t know what it is. 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.

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.”

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.

This can be simplified into two things. When you do personal development, 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. 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.”

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 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.

So, personal development is a combination of technical knowledge (skills) and self-knowledge (insight, attributes, capacities).

Why Personal Development Fails

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. Without self-knowledge, we are self-deceived and will inevitable fail in our personal development efforts.

Gaining self-knowledge transforms how you feel, think, and see yourself, others, and the world around you.

And… 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 reorient yourself. And you will reorient 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. 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?

Self-knowledge brings freedom. 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?

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.

The Inconvenient Truth

Personal development means stripping away what you are not. (That’s the death & rebirth part reflected in The Hero’s Journey). 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. 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.

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.

Want a bit more?…

In a series of blog posts, I outlined different approaches to what personal development is, what tends to hold people back from making a real transformation, and why this is so important for anyone who is trying to really change any part of themselves. Those blog posts are (in order):

The content of these blog posts is what I wished I’d known 30 years ago.

I start with discussing the impact of not understanding personal development (Personal Development…), describe how I hope to help folks better understand it (My Mission), and then give you my working definition of personal development (Defined).

I then go through four models or “lenses” of personal development that cast light on this important topic:

Mental Complexity (adult development model)
Awareness (the Enneagram’s levels of development)
Bonus: What Holds You Back: Unlocking the Enneagram
Integration (integration of PEMS: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual)
Attributes (expression of five attributes: sobriety, feeling, warmth, strength, presence)