subject: Defining Personal Development Awareness [print this page] We often hear about personal development gurus harping on virtues, values, and strategies for improving oneself. It's hard to imagine why, despite the wealth of available resources for personal development, there are still a lot of people who feel hopelessly stuck where they are, with no apparent chance or opportunity for improvement. So where does one start the road to personal development?
The most important thing to kick off any initiative for developing your personality is self-awareness. This is the stage where you go from denial to acceptance, the point where you recognize your flaws, and the fact that these flaws are causing the setbacks that you are currently experiencing, and being convinced that the key to your personal advancement is to get past through these flaws. Self-awareness, in short, is the state of being conscious about oneself, particularly who you are, and how you can be expected to respond to certain stimuli.
However, to be able to understand self-awareness enough to motivate you into pushing to achieve this state, we need to go beyond semantics and take a look at the concept on an emotional level. Self-awareness is a process driven by introspection, or looking into oneself to see what motivates us, what makes us angry, what annoys us, and what we desire most of all. It involves making an assessment of our strengths and weaknesses, our successes and shortcomings, and the factors that caused them.
The process of achieving self-awareness is aimed at giving you a clear understanding of the forces that move you to take certain actions or say certain words. Knowing these allows you to take control of your future actions and harness your talents.
