So you want to develop your personhood? You’re in luck! You’ve come to the right place. Let’s take a look at the key areas of personal development so that you have a full picture of what’s involved.
There are multiple models for understanding the key areas of personal development. For instance, you can think of it in terms of the roles you play, the meta-skills you possess, and the choices you make. Looking at your development from diverse angles leads to well-rounded personal growth.
Key Areas of Personal Development: Dimensions of Existence
The dimensions model presents 10 key areas of personal development. To make the most of who you are, you’ll want to pay attention to each of these domains.
Of course, you may not focus on them equally all the time. You can figure out which ones are most important to you right now and develop yourself in those areas. The others may be more relevant to your goals and desires at another point in your life.
The 10 dimensions of existence are:
Career
Emotional
Exercise
Finance
Intellectual
Physical
Physical Environment
Romance
Social
Spiritual
Most of these dimensions are fairly self-explanatory, but questions often pop up about the difference between the emotional and intellectual dimensions.
The intellectual dimension is about the mind. It’s your ideas about how you put together the world. You can think of it as your philosophy about life. What you’re currently learning can slide into this category as well.
The emotional dimension refers to the realm of feelings. It addresses whether or not you’re experiencing the feelings that you want to experience in the world. With that said, there are no bad or wrong feelings. Rather, this is a matter of getting in touch with what feelings you want to be experiencing and then making sure that those are the feelings in your life.
Key Areas of Personal Development: The Skills of Choosing
You’re in the driver’s seat of your life and get to choose which way you will go. The choices you make can help develop your personhood.
The Choice of Authenticity
When you choose authenticity, you choose to be yourself in every situation. You don’t make apologies for the person you are. Instead, you fully embrace your reality.
The Choice of Reflection
If your goal is to grow, then you’ll want to pay attention to the thoughts in your head. Reflecting on your feelings, ideas, and experiences helps you learn more about who you are and who you want to be.
The Choice of Centering
You are the center of your reality. It’s a fact that you are in the very middle. Look around. There you are. Look around again. There you are, again, right in the middle every time. When you accept that, you can make the choice to center yourself in your own reality.
The Choice of Responsibility
You are the chief authority in your life. You can choose to accept that responsibility, putting yourself in charge of who you want to be and what you want to do.
Key Areas of Personal Development: Radical Shifts
You can think of your personal development in terms of radical shifts that you want to make. There are three main realms to consider: authority, connection, and mindset.
Radical Authority
This goes right along with the Choice of Responsibility. It is the idea of making the decisions for your life and being in charge of your judgments about the world.
Radical Authority
The judgments you make about the world influence your mindset. The idea of making judgments sometimes gets a bad rap, but the truth of the matter is that people make judgments all day every day. That’s how we navigate the world.
You judge things that bring you closer to what you want as good. Conversely, you judge things that take you further from what you want as bad. As you do so, you can make a radical mindset shift by cultivating a philosophy that works for you.
Radical Connection
This is the realization that you are not separate; you simply can’t be.
Right at this moment, you are losing molecules to the environment around you and taking molecules into you. Consider the bacteria living in your gut right now. If you didn’t have them, you wouldn’t be able to process your food, and you’d die. But even though they’re in you and you need them, they aren’t you. They aren’t your DNA.
You coexist with all that is in you and all that is around you. You are connected to everything, and the line between you and the world is impossible to draw. Cultivating your awareness of that is a radical connection.
Key Areas of Personal Development: The Roles You Play
You can develop yourself in accordance with the roles that you hold in life.
You are a money creator. This is your professional role. It’s the way that you show up to work and get things done.
You are a person in relationships with others. Some of those relationships may be close and intimate ones, but that’s not all that this category covers. In fact, even if you don’t have close people in your life, you can’t get anywhere in the world without connecting with others in some way. Perhaps you’ll think of this aspect of personal development in terms of the way you show up with your board game club or the way you show up on your soccer team.
When you think of your roles within these areas, you can ask yourself the question, “How can I be most effective for what I want out of these roles?” Then, you can work on developing yourself in those ways.
Remember, in everything, you are the center. Shape your development around your goals and ambitions for yourself in your various roles.
Key Areas of Personal Development: Meta Skills
Meta skills are skills that, once they’re developed can be used all over the place.
There are many different meta-skills out there, and the more of them you can develop, the better. Through them, you’ll become a well-rounded, versatile person with abilities for success in a wide variety of contexts.
In some of these areas, you may already feel strong and capable. However, you might have it in your head that the others simply aren’t in your wheelhouse. But each one is just a skill. People develop these skills all the time. You can too.
Critical Thinking
This skill involves bringing your thoughts into question so that you can evaluate them properly. Studying the rules of logic will go far in helping you become a skilled critical thinker. Thinking fallacies stem from a misapprehension of logic. If you can develop your grasp on logic, that will pay dividends in your ability to think clearly.
Language
You already have language skills, many of which you probably acquired passively. To take your language skills further, you can do intentional work in this area and study the art of communication. Language skills will help you connect with others and clearly express your needs and desires.
Acting
When you develop your acting skills, you’re engaging in the art of connecting with another emotional experience in another person’s story in the world. That is really useful, and you can put it to work for you in so many ways once you have the skill down. At any given time, you’ll be able to act like someone else, and that will help you manage your emotions and your interpretations of the world.
Sales and Enrollment
For effective sales, you’ll want to connect with others in a way that shows you what’s important to them. Then, you can invite them to contribute to what’s most important in the world or what’s most important to you. There’s collaboration there, and it has the power to generate sales or enroll people in your way of seeing things.
Marketing
The art of marketing involves getting people’s eyes and minds on something. There’s a decision to be made, and your role is to confront people with it. When you can do that well, you’ve developed your marketing skills.
Ergonomics
This is the skill of knowing how to use your body — such as how to stand, move, walk and use tools. Those things may seem obvious, but some approaches are more beneficial for your body than others. When you’re skilled at ergonomics, you can approach these tasks in ways that will wear out your system as little as possible.
Physiology
In addition to learning how to move, you can also learn how to control your body. Skills in this area include knowing how to soothe yourself by slowing your heart rate and bringing down your blood pressure.
Each of these approaches to understanding the areas of personal development is a little different, but each one holds value. One may be more meaningful to you right now, and you might choose to view things through a different set of lenses in the future.
Benjamin Easter is the Founder and Head Coach at Lucid Shift Coaching. He helps people connect with their authentic selves and grow in wisdom and freedom. Ben has undergraduate degrees in philosophy and religion and a master's degree in traditional Chinese medicine. He has studied kung fu, tai chi, dance, social dynamics, learning, and uses these and many more disciplines to help people unlock their potential.
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