What even is personal development?

If you ask ten people what personal development means you'll get ten different answers. A few will mention therapy. A few will picture someone shouting motivational quotes from a stage. Most will shrug, because somewhere along the way, the phrase got used so often it stopped meaning anything at all.

So, let's actually pin it down.

The spectrum, from therapy to coaching 

Personal development sits on a spectrum. At one end, there's therapy, which looks backwards at what has gone before. It's there to help you understand what happened to you and why you experience the world the way you do. At the other end, there's coaching, which looks forwards. At this end instead of "understand the past," the focus is "do something different, starting now."

In the middle sits everything else. Courses, books, retreats, group programmes, the whole world of products and self-directed learning that doesn't require you to sit across from someone and talk. Not quite backward-looking, not quite the forward-moving push of coaching, but doing useful work of its own in between the two.

There's a second axis worth knowing about too, and that one can change how you choose where to spend your time and money. Rather than focussing just on the nature of the conversation this axis considers the nature of the investment. Therapy, frankly, is criminally underpriced for the work it does. You can get an hour with a properly trained therapist for less than you'd spend on a decent cut and colour, which tells you more about how we value emotional labour than it does about therapy itself. Further along the spectrum, coaching can cost considerably more, and that's not a value judgement, it's just worth knowing before you commit your money to the wrong end of it for what you need.

Mentoring sits slightly outside this spectrum rather than on it, and I'd argue it behaves a bit differently to everything else on the list. Mentoring works by lending you someone else's experience. In business, that works well, because if I've built a business, the fact that I've built a business is relevant to you building yours. In the personal work space, it's murkier. The fact that I had a difficult year, or a difficult childhood, doesn't automatically mean my experience of it is relevant to yours. That's the thing about mentoring in this space. It presumes relevance that isn't always there.

What personal development comes down to 

What matters more than any of that, though, is that personal development, at its core, is your chance to look at yourself clearly and ask a few honest questions. Who am I being? How is that shaping my results, or my lack of them? What do I believe about myself and about the world? How is all of that running the show without me ever really clocking it?

That's it. That's the whole thing underneath all the noise.

I didn't always see this so clearly myself. It took my own experience of building a business, and not quite getting it right the first time, to realise there was a piece of the puzzle I hadn't been looking at. You can have all the marketing funnels in the world, all the product ladders and sales scripts you like, and none of it will fix you not showing up in your business the way you need to. That's why I chose to build my business in this space. Not because I had all the answers, but because I'd really lived the question. 

Who this personal development for 

What I really want you to take from this is that personal development isn't just for people who are visibly struggling. It isn't just for people that are mid-crisis, mid-burnout or mid-meltdown. Some of the people who most need to pay attention to this are the ones who think they're doing absolutely fine.

Doing fine is great. These people will tell you, quite honestly, that they don't have a problem, and they might not, in the sense they mean it. But there's very often something running in the background that's shaping far more of their life than they realise, showing up in completely different ways depending on where they are and what they're doing. At work. As a leader. As a team member. As a parent. In how they show up in their own business.

Next time, I want to show you what that looks like. I’ll pick one single belief, and the surprisingly different costumes it wears depending on which part of your life it turns up in.

If this has stirred even a flicker of recognition, that's worth paying attention to. My programmes are built exactly for this kind of work, helping you see clearly what's running the show and do something about it. With awareness, we have choice.  Without awareness, we have autopilot.  Do you really want to hand over your life and success to a driverless car??

Take a peek  at what's on offer, or if you'd rather talk it through first, drop me a message at johanna@wavesofpotential.com.