What does it mean to develop yourself?
Today they talk about the need to develop yourself as an individual, starting almost from kindergarten. Moreover, what I don’t particularly like, many people tell what this development should be and what it should be based on only from their experience and from their own bell tower.
I am convinced that you need to develop yourself regularly and every age has its own characteristics of this process. Speaking about what it means to develop oneself, I would immediately like to point out that this is a complex concept that is based on the following fundamental points:
- Development of yourself as an individual;
- Develop yourself creatively, intellectually and spiritually;
- Improve in a certain social area;
- Developing yourself as a representative of a business or a certain profession.
Plus, your role in the family, in the social world, and even your reputation are taken into account.
How much does it cost to develop yourself?
Many philosophers have been and are looking for answers to this question, but they cannot offer us a universal recipe suitable for everyone. Maybe it’s for the better, since everyone’s comfort zone is different, and its boundaries cannot be contained within a certain framework.
It is important to understand that development is a constant process, just at each stage there are new goals and tasks to be solved.
I would like to emphasize that development at 3 years is no less important than development at 25 years. Many of our habits, inclinations and even creative moments are instilled from early childhood, so why not constantly develop and improve them. And here we are talking about hunger (in the good sense of the word), creative, spiritual, intellectual hunger, when, feeling thirsty, you strive to fill yourself with fresh water. At first you get saturated with a few drops, and then even one glass is not enough for you.
Stages of development and personality formation
- First stage (1st year of life): there is a tendency to interact with people, or to withdraw from communication with them.
- Second stage (2-3 years): independence, self-confidence.
- Third, fourth (3-6 years and 7-13): curiosity, perseverance, tendency to understand the world around us, improvement of both communication and cognitive skills.
- Fifth stage (13-20 years): sexual and life self-determination.
- Sixth (20-50 years): satisfaction with reality, education of the future generation.
- Seventh (50-60 years): full, creative life, pride in one’s own children.
- Eighth (over 60 years): the ability to perceive thoughts about death, studying one’s own successes, the stage of perception of one’s actions, decisions of the past.
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Types of self-development
Open any textbook on psychology or NLP and you will see such a huge classification of types of self-development that you will be surprised that such aspects exist at all. And let you call me a conservative, in some sense of the word, but I will focus on 5 main points that are important to me, and in which directions I try to develop myself every day. At the same time, a useful addition will be material on how to find yourself, which contains the basic tools to help you find your true self.
Creative development
Today it is often said that the learning process of a child and an adult (in particular at university) should be turned into a fun game, thereby triggering development mechanisms. It’s hard to disagree with this, because, remember, when we first took a felt-tip pen or a brush to draw - the masterpiece, to put it mildly, was so-so, but each time our skills improved and our skills became more conscious. Among the things that develop me, I can highlight the desire to discover new countries, because the local flavor, traditions, and residents have a strong influence and set me in a creative mood.
Professional Development
In order to develop yourself in this way, the main emphasis does not need to be on school, university, technical school or academy. The question is that they will give you certain skills and abilities, but how useful will they be to you in your further development? If you asked me how I developed myself from a professional point of view, I would say that I used the “5 Ps” rule (I came up with it myself, dear readers and investors. Enjoy it to your health)
- Adopted the experience and knowledge of others;
- Practiced and conducted experiments;
- Traveled;
- Enjoyed life;
- She looked positively into the future.
This set of mental practices will help you develop yourself in different areas, because you must admit, you always want to be an active person who can support a conversation about music, and travels around the world, and learns new languages, and has information about what’s going on in the world of finance happens, and knows how ether is mined, and how lagman is prepared.
Sports development
In a healthy body healthy mind! Therefore, I am convinced that along with intellectual, professional and creative development, we should not forget about its sportive form. No one wants to barely walk at 30 and feel like they are 50 years old, so from my own experience I will say that light but regular sports activity, frequent walking, swimming have not harmed anyone, but they have allowed them to noticeably improve their appearance and mood.
Intellectual development
I believe that a person does not have to know everything, after all, he is not Wikipedia, and no one forces him to be one. But learning new things, striving to learn something new is an important tool in self-development. That is why I always offer readers materials from various areas, from how to choose a miner for cryptocurrency mining to what remote work is, and how to completely reformat your life so that you can receive income and not be a cog in the office system.
Important: It’s never too late and never a shame to learn. Learning is fun and necessary throughout your life. Don’t be afraid to ask questions; the answers to them are your bag of knowledge.
Spiritual development
Meditation, relaxation techniques, rest, healthy, restful and regular sleep help to develop spiritually and enjoy life. Sometimes something has to happen in life in order to understand that developing yourself spiritually is just as important and extremely necessary as engaging in external or mental improvement.
Among the many people I know who regularly relax, practice spiritual practices, change places of residence and have a positive outlook on life, almost all of them are positive and optimistic people who give solar energy to the world, and the world gives them a hundredfold.
Among the main features of spiritual development are faith in the best and healthy egoism. You cannot become calm and receive joy from life if you do not receive it directly from yourself.
By combining all these types of self-development, you can live as a harmonious person who inspires others and also receives positive energy from others.
True, Freud said that the ideal person for him would be one who keeps his subconscious in total submission. But the very spirit of his writings leaves too little confidence in the possibility of such subordination. The cunning and power of Freud's horse will become especially clear when we remember that Freud attributed not only instincts, drives, repressed impulses and desires to the unconscious. The unconscious also includes many instances of the “super-ego” - moral guidelines, patterns and prohibitions, which, being for one reason or another repressed from consciousness, continue to dominate a person from the area of the unconscious. Taking this into account, we can say that consciousness is trying to control not a horse, but rather a centaur - a creature that is stronger and, in addition to cunning, intelligent, has its own head (repressed instances of the “super-ego”), and not just rather vague, diffuse, but powerful impulses of repressed desire. The situation with the consciousness of “I”, “ego” becomes completely hopeless, and the chances of curbing the centaur become negligible...
This is a point of view, criticism of which is widely given in the Russian psychological literature (Rubinstein, 1957; Bassin, 1968; Yaroshevsky, 1974; etc.). Of course, it could not satisfy many foreign researchers, especially those who tried to directly study a productive healthy personality. The most striking here was the direction called humanistic psychology (Buller, Maslow, Allport, etc.). Of particular interest to us is Allport's concept, which was created in heated polemics with behaviorism and Freudianism and is in many ways their theoretical antipode. Allport, rightly complaining that most modern concepts of personality are built on the study of “stunted” subjects, sets as his goal the study of a healthy, productive personality, to understand it in its entirety and uniqueness. Let us dwell on Allport's theory in more detail.
Unlike Freud, according to whom human motivation stems from unconscious sexual drives, Allport develops the position of functional autonomy of the individual. The basic principles of this autonomy are as follows. The motives are “modern”, i.e. whatever they are, they operate in the moment, and their focus may be functionally unrelated to their historical “predecessors” or previous goals. The nature of motives in the period from childhood to adulthood changes so radically that the motives of a normal adult can only be considered as substitutes for childhood drives, but not as their natural continuation and complication. Hence, the maturity of a personality is determined by the degree of functional autonomy achieved by its motives. An adult individual demonstrates maturity to the extent that he has surpassed earlier (childhood) forms of motivation (Allport, 1940).
Allport emphasizes that the functioning of the basic motives in the determining part occurs quite consciously and a healthy, normal individual always knows what he is doing and why he is doing it. Hence, an adequate method for studying a normal personality will be a direct clarification of the plans, aspirations and hopes of a given person (of which he can always give an account), and not the establishment, through the interpretation of dreams and the results of projective tests, of repressed infantile dramas. Thus, if Freud’s “I” is subordinate to the forces of the unconscious (the horse guides the rider), then for Allport it is the conscious “I” that has the main dynamic force in a healthy personality and plays a decisive role in the organization and direction of human behavior.
Allport agrees with other authors of the humanistic movement in polemics with psychoanalysis and behaviorism, which reduces the mechanism of action of human needs to homeostasis, “tension reduction”, to the fact that the main thing here is to “reduce tension”, to bring the personality system to a state of peace and satisfaction.
Based on these ideas, Allport identifies a number of psychological mechanisms (more precisely, descriptive characteristics) that are characteristic of a normal personality. These are the following so-called anabolic mechanisms: 1) an active position in relation to reality, studying and overcoming reality, and not running away from it; 2) accessibility of experience to consciousness (i.e. the ability to see the events of one’s own life as they are, without resorting to “psychological defense”); 3) self-knowledge with the presence of humor; 4) ability to abstract; 5) a constant process of individualization - the development and complexity of the inner personality, which, however, does not lead to autism; 6) functional autonomy of motives; 7) resistance to frustration.
In contrast to the anabolic mechanisms that ensure mental health, Allport provides a list of catabolic, pathogenic mechanisms (again, more precisely, properties). This is: 1) a passive position in relation to reality; 2) repression; 3) other ways to protect the “I” (rationalization, reactive formations, projections and substitutions, all sorts of forms of distortion of the true state of affairs for the sake of internal balance and tranquility); 4) limited thinking at a specific level; 5) all kinds of forms of “ossification” of development. According to Allport (1970), it is these mechanisms, qualitatively different from anabolic ones, that are characteristic of various cases of anomalies.
So, this is a concept that identifies a number of important positive characteristics of such a person, which are directly opposed to the flawed ideas about a person in the spirit of behaviorism and psychoanalysis. However, we cannot ignore all the significant limitations, the main of which, in our opinion, is the following. Here (as in most concepts of humanistic psychology) the focus is on the individual, who obviously impresses as mature and productive. “The method that Allport implicitly follows when constructing his theory,” L. I. Antsyferova rightly notes, “is a method of generalizing the personal qualities of outstanding, creative representatives of humanity” (1970, p. 171). As a result, an unjustifiably optimistic picture of man will be created, but the main thing is that in these perfect samples, as in any finished product, the process that led to its appearance dies. Here we are pointed to the top (esse Homo), leaving the path to it unknown, a path that is nothing more than the normal development of personality. This path is common to people, and not the prerogative of the outstanding. The latter form a single goal of the movement with other people. Concepts like Allport's, in fact breaking this chain, are unable, based on their categories, to explain the nature of deviations from normal personality development, deviations, both serious and fairly transient, temporary. It is no coincidence that the above list of catabolic, pathogenic mechanisms looks in many ways simply borrowed from the theoretical concepts of Freudianism. Thus, Allport’s concept once again confirms the dilemma that is typical for representatives of psychologists about the norm: on the one hand, the “dissolution” of a healthy personality in a neurotic one and hence ignorance of the specifics of the norm, and on the other, the absolutization of a healthy, self-actualizing personality and the inability to explain abnormal development. As a result, the concept of norm seems to hang in the air, not connected with all the diversity of real mental life. The task of a genuine theory of personality is to explain, based on its categories and principles, both cases of normal development leading to a comprehensive and harmonious development of the personality, and cases of anomalies of this development.
The creation of such a theory requires, first of all, the identification of specific units of personality analysis, the consideration of the driving contradictions that underlie the development of personality throughout life, the indication of psychological conditions and the reasons for their normal and deviant functioning (see essay III).
Approaches to understanding the norm – previous | next – Problems of the science of psychology
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How much do you need to develop yourself?
The answer to this question directly depends on what you want to get out of life, what small and global goals you are pursuing and how well you have the tools to achieve them. I am convinced that this needs to be done throughout life and constantly increase the tasks, as well as hone them for a certain age and needs. At the same time, I am also confident that our close environment helps us develop ourselves and directly influences our harmonious portrait as a person.
That's why it's always so moving to watch the Academy Awards ceremony when the winners thank those who were there along the way. Although, it is worth noting that everyone in life has certain crises that require solutions, and sometimes, having achieved a certain, so alluring goal, one becomes lazy to develop oneself further and wants to fold one’s hands and do nothing. In this case, I give myself one day of complete rest - without work, the Internet, mobile phone and news - I enjoy the rest, and after a couple of days this depressive state suddenly goes away.
I think, dear readers of GQ Blog Monitor, you definitely love to develop yourself creatively, especially since there are a lot of ways to do this. One of them can be considered a series of webinars, which will start in May. Through these online practices, we will explore basic personality, character, and behavior types and how they impact our world and our investing policies.
Traditionally, when putting a period in the material from the “Thoughts” section, I would replace it with an ellipsis. I wish you to develop yourself from different sides and get indescribable pleasure from it. And since the material ends with an ellipsis - an open ending, your useful comments and valuable tips below will help make it more complete and informative.
Author Ganesa K.
A professional investor with 5 years of experience working with various financial instruments, runs his own blog and advises investors. Own effective methods and information support for investments.
