What is Personal Development?

People regularly ask me what personal development is. First, personal development is a 16 billion dollar worldwide industry and is booming in Australia.  Australians have a high uptake of personal or self development.  So business in this industry is potentially highly lucrative and for me very satisfying.  It is my passion!

Second, personal development is mostly about getting the results in life that you want, not just leaving how your life turns out to chance, opportunity or whim (Steve Linton, How I Made Six Figures in One Month, Big Air Publishing) .  You can create your life to be as you want it to be and get the results that you choose.  You can be, do, have anything that you want if you just understand how – that is where personal developement comes in.  With the best quality personal development you can change the way that you think about your life or anything at all.  Because everyone of us has grown up believing certain things that we have picked up from our parents, educators and others who are important in our life, we often have beliefs and ideas that are not our own, not carefully selcted by us.  They belong to others.

Given that these beliefs are not a part of us, they might be causing you to lead your life according to others beliefs. The sort of things that I am talking about are ideas like, “you can only get somewhere in life through hard work” or “if it is not hard it is not worth doing”.  Well, what if these are wrong, what if you can get somewhere through a different path and what if easy work is worth doing.  Some people will never know because they do not explore and work through their own ideas, change them and create a belief set all of their own.

This is personal development, the will to consider that what you currently believe to be correct is not the only way to view the world. There may be other ways and the idea is to be open and flexible to what you think and focus your attention on, be willing to change and find new and different ways.  Personal development assists you to set you own goals and then find ways to achieve them.  Personal development assists you to live your dream and achieve success, whatever form that takes for you.