Truth of Personal Development

I’ve been a self-confessed personal development junkie for well over a decade now, I just love it! It is the foundation of all success – I truly believe in order to create the level of success in your life you might want, then you have to become the quality of person in the first place to create that level of result.

So many people have poor relationship to personal development because they associate it with the need to change themselves which inherently suggests that there is something to actually change, and frankly no-one wants to admit that to themselves even if they do need it; but this is a completely misunderstood notion of what personal development is.

The point of personal development is not to change who you are as a person. The point is to improve the person you already are and to become more aware of who you already are, so then you are able to become more, be more able to accept the gifts of who you actually are and to express that more fully in your life.When you’re trying to change who you are, you’re actually being inauthentic with your core self. You can’t actually change who you are; your individual genius and core traits are already actually there.The challenge in life however is that along the way of just simply living life and growing up, especially when we are in our more impressionable years; we have so many external influences and other opinions and expectations and limitations are projected on to us and slowly by surely, layer after layer for lack of a better word ‘crap’ is stacked on top of our pure authentic selves. As you begin on this development of self journey and becoming more aware, we then begin the process of peeling it back layer by layer coming back to our true authentic self.So when, if you’re trying to change your identity away from who you truly are,you start becoming inauthentic with yourself and it starts to become hard work to sustain and actually create the success by trying to be someone else. So even when it comes to modeling other people, the point about it is not to change and try to be who this other person is. You can’t do that. You’re not them.

You don’t have the same make-up. You’re a different person with a different background, a different set of experiences; your DNA is completely different.

You cannot be this other person. Modeling is about recognizing some individual traits in this person who at some deep level you see within yourself and you want to actually improve the expression of that trait that you experience in your daily life, and then you tend to adapt it in your own way to express it from a standpoint of who you actually are. So personal development, a lot of people think makes them think that ‘well, I gotta change who I am’, that’s not what it’s about. It’s becoming aware of who you already are, becoming aware of your individual genius. Having the capacity to express more of who you are in a more authentic way because that’s the only way you’re going to become successful. You are here to become more of who you already and that’s what personal development is all about.

Sure we have to get rid of some bad habits and some things like that but I tell you what, those bad habits and bad belief systems generally aren’t who we are as individuals. That’s actually not part of our identity. We’re just changing some layers that we put on top of our identity and on top of our authentic self. So your bad habits and good habits will tend to just be that and what we want to do is become more authentic with who we really are and we have to express those gifts more fully. That’s what personal development really is all about. And that’s what modeling is really all about and it all begins with self-awareness.