Cosa si intende per sviluppo personale?
Lo sviluppo personale comprende attività che migliorano la consapevolezza e l'identità, sviluppano talenti e potenzialità, costruiscono il capitale umano e facilitano il trovare lavoro, migliorano la qualità della vita e contribuiscono alla realizzazione di sogni e aspirazioni.
Il concetto non è limitato all'auto aiuto, ma comprende attività formali e informali per lo sviluppo di altri, in ruoli come insegnante, guida, counselor, manager, coach, o mentore.
Infine, lo sviluppo personale all'interno delle istituzioni, si riferisce ai metodi, programmi, strumenti, tecniche e sistemi di valutazione che supportano lo sviluppo umano a livello individuale nelle organizzazioni.
A livello individuale, lo sviluppo personale comprende le seguenti attività:
- migliorare la consapevolezza di sé
- migliorare la conoscenza di sé
- costruire o rinnovare l' identità
- punti di forza in via di sviluppo o talenti
- miglioramento del benessere
- sviluppo spirituale
- identificare o sviluppare il potenziale
- costruire l'occupabilità del capitale umano
- migliorare lo stile di vita o la qualità della vita
- migliorare la salute
- raggiungere le proprie aspirazioni
- avviare una impresa o l' autonomia personale
- definire ed eseguire piani di sviluppo personale
- miglioramento delle capacità sociali
Il concetto riguarda un settore più ampio di quello di auto-sviluppo o di auto-aiuto: lo sviluppo personale include anche lo sviluppo di altre persone.
Ciò può avvenire attraverso i ruoli, come quelli di un insegnante o mentore, tramite una competenza personale - come ad esempio l'abilità di alcuni manager nello sviluppo del potenziale dei dipendenti- o un servizio professionale (come la fornitura di formazione, di valutazione o coaching).
Oltre a migliorare se stessi e gli altri in via di sviluppo, lo sviluppo personale è un campo di pratica e ricerca.
Come un campo di pratica comprende i metodi di sviluppo personale, programmi di apprendimento, sistemi di valutazione, strumenti e tecniche.
Come un campo di ricerca, i temi di sviluppo personale appaiono sempre in riviste scientifiche, recensioni di istruzione superiore, riviste e libri di gestione aziendali.
Qualsiasi tipo di sviluppo - sia economico, politico, biologico, organizzativo o personale - è necessario un quadro, se si vuole sapere se il cambiamento è effettivamente verificato.
In caso di sviluppo personale, un individuo spesso funziona come il giudice primario di miglioramento, ma la convalida di miglioramento oggettivo richiede una valutazione in base a criteri standard. Framework di sviluppo personali possono includere obiettivi o parametri che definiscono gli end-point, strategie o piani per raggiungere gli obiettivi, la misurazione e valutazione dei progressi, i livelli o fasi che definiscono tappe lungo un percorso di sviluppo e un sistema di feedback per fornire informazioni sui cambiamenti.
Personal development includes activities that improve awareness and identity, develop talents and potential, build human capital and facilitates employability, enhance quality of life and contribute to the realization of dreams and aspirations. The concept is not limited to self-help but includes formal and informal activities for developing others, in roles such as teacher, guide, counsellor, manager, coach, or mentor. Finally, as personal development takes place in the context of institutions, it refers to the methods, programs, tools, techniques, and assessment systems that support human development at the individual level in organizations.[1]
At the level of the individual, personal development includes the following activities:
- improving self-awareness
- improving self-knowledge
- building or renewing identity
- developing strengths or talents
- improving wealth
- spiritual development
- identifying or improving potential
- building employability or human capital
- enhancing lifestyle or the quality of life
- improving health
- fulfilling aspirations
- initiating a life enterprise or personal autonomy
- defining and executing personal development plans
- improving social abilities
Beyond improving oneself and developing others, personal development is a field of practice and research. As a field of practice it includes personal development methods, learning programs, assessment systems, tools and techniques. As a field of research, personal development topics increasingly appear in scientific journals, higher education reviews, management journals and business books.
Any sort of development — whether economic, political, biological, organizational or personal — requires a framework if one wishes to know whether change has actually occurred. In the case of personal development, an individual often functions as the primary judge of improvement, but validation of objective improvement requires assessment using standard criteria. Personal development frameworks may include goals or benchmarks that define the end-points, strategies or plans for reaching goals, measurement and assessment of progress, levels or stages that define milestones along a development path, and a feedback system to provide information on changes.
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Origins
Major religions, such as the Abrahamic and Indian religions, as well as New Age philosophies, have used practices such as prayer, music, dance, singing, chanting, poetry, writing, sports and martial arts. These practices have various functions, such as health or aesthetic satisfaction, but they may also link to "final goals" of personal development such as discovering the meaning of life or living good life (compare philosophy).Michel Foucault describes in Care of the Self[5] the techniques of epimelia used in ancient Greece and Rome, which included dieting, exercise, sexual abstinence, contemplation, prayer and confession — some of which also became important practices within different branches of Christianity. In yoga, a discipline originating in India, possibly over 3000 years ago, personal-development techniques include meditation, rhythmic breathing, stretching and postures. Wushu and T'ai chi ch'uan utilise traditional Chinese techniques, including breathing and energy exercises, meditation, martial arts, as well as practices linked to traditional Chinese medicine, such as dieting, massage and acupuncture. In Islam, which arose almost 1500 years ago in the Middle East, personal development techniques include ritual prayer, recitation of the Qur'an, pilgrimage, fasting and tazkiyah (purification of the soul)].
Two individual ancient philosophers stand out as major sources of what has become personal development in the 21st century, representing a Western tradition and an East Asian tradition. Elsewhere anonymous founders of schools of self-development appear endemic - note the traditions of the Indian sub-continent in this regard.
Aristotle and the Western tradition
The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) influenced theoriesof personal development in the West. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defined personal development as a category of phronesis or practical wisdom, where the practice of virtues (arête) leads to eudaimonia,[7] commonly translated as "happiness" but more accurately understood as “human flourishing” or “living well".[8] Aristotle continues to influence the Western concept of personal development to this day, particularly in the economics of human development[9] and in positive psychology.[10]Confucius and the East Asian tradition
In Chinese tradition, Confucius (around 551 BC – 479 BC) founded an ongoing philosophy. His ideas continue to influence family values, education and management in China and East Asia. In his Great Learning Confucius wrote:The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.[11]
Contexts
Personal development in psychology
Psychology became linked to personal development, not with the psychoanalysis of Freud (1856–1939) but starting with his contemporaries Alfred Adler (1870–1937) and Carl Jung (1875–1961).Adler refused to limit psychology to analysis, making the important point that aspirations look forward and do not limit themselves to unconscious drives or to childhood experiences.[12] He also originated the concepts of lifestyle (1929 — he defined "lifestyle" as an individual's characteristic approach to life, in facing problems) and of self image, a concept that influenced management under the heading of work-life balance.
Carl Gustav Jung made contributions to personal development with his concept of individuation, which he saw as the drive of the individual to achieve the wholeness and balance of the Self.[13]
Daniel Levinson (1920–1994) developed Jung’s early concept of "life stages" and included a sociological perspective. Levinson proposed that personal development come under the influence — throughout life — of aspirations, which he called "the Dream":
Whatever the nature of his Dream, a young man has the developmental task of giving it greater definition and finding ways to live it out. It makes a great difference in his growth whether his initial life structure is consonant with and infused by the Dream, or opposed to it. If the Dream remains unconnected to his life it may simply die, and with it his sense of aliveness and purpose.[14]Levinson’s model of seven life-stages has been considerably modifieddue to sociological changes in the lifecycle.[15]
Research on success in reaching goals, as undertaken by Albert Bandura (born 1925), suggested that self-efficacy[16] best explains why people with the same level of knowledge and skills get very different results. According to Bandura self-confidence functions as a powerful predictor of success because:[17]
- it makes you expect to succeed
- it allows you take risks and set challenging goals
- it helps you keep trying if at first you don’t succeed
- it helps you control emotions and fears when the going gets rough
We have discovered that there is a set of human strengths that are the most likely buffers against mental illness: courage, optimism, interpersonal skill, work ethic, hope, honesty and perseverance. Much of the task of prevention will be to create a science of human strength whose mission will be to foster these virtues in young people.[18]
Personal development in higher education
Personal development has been at the heart of education in the West in the form of the Greek philosophers; and in the East with Confucius. Some people[which?] emphasize personal development as a part of higher education. Wilhelm von Humboldt, who founded the University of Berlin (since 1949: Humboldt University of Berlin) in 1810, made a statement interpretable[by whom?] as referring to personal development: … if there is one thing more than another which absolutely requires free activity on the part of the individual, it is precisely education, whose object it is to develop the individual.[19]During the 1960s a large increase in the number of students on American campuses[20] led to research on the personal development needs of undergraduate students. Arthur Chickering defined 7 vectors of personal development[21] for young adults during their undergraduate years:
- developing competence
- managing emotions
- achieving autonomy and interdependence
- developing mature interpersonal relationships
- establishing identity
- developing purpose
- developing integrity
* a structured and supported process undertaken by an individual to reflect upon their own learning, performance and / or achievement and to plan for their personal, educational and career development;
* objectives related explicitly to student development; to improve the capacity of students to understand what and how they are learning, and to review, plan and take responsibility for their own learning
In the 1990s, business schools began to set up specific personal-development programs for leadership and career orientation and in 1998 the European Foundation for Management Development set up the Equis accreditation system[24][ which specified that personal development must form part of the learning process through internships, working on team projects and going abroad for work or exchange programs.
The first personal development certification required for business school graduation originated in 2002 as a partnership between Metizo,[25] a personal-development consulting firm, and the Euromed Management School[26] in Marseilles: students must not only complete assignments but also demonstrate self-awareness and achievement of personal-development competencies.
As an academic department personal development has become[when?] a specific discipline, usually associated with business schools.[27] As an area of research, personal development draws on links to other academic disciplines:
- education for questions of learning and assessment
- psychology for motivation and personality
- sociology for identity and social networks
- economics for human capital and economic value
- philosophy for ethics and self-reflection
Personal development in the workplace
Abraham Maslow (1908–1970), proposed a hierarchy of needs with self actualization at the top, defined as:[28]
… the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.
Since Maslow himself believed that only a small minority of people self-actualize — he estimated one percent[29] — his hierarchy of needs had the consequence that organizations came to regard self-actualization or personal development as occurring at the top of the organizational pyramid, while job security and good working conditions would fulfill the needs of the mass of employees.As organizations and labor markets became more global, responsibility for development shifted from the company to the individual. In 1999 management thinker Peter Drucker wrote in the Harvard Business Review:
We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: if you’ve got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession, regardless of where you started out. But with opportunity comes responsibility. Companies today aren’t managing their employees’ careers; knowledge workers must, effectively, be their own chief executive officers. It’s up to you to carve out your place, to know when to change course, and to keep yourself engaged and productive during a work life that may span some 50 years.[30]Management professors Sumantra Ghoshal of the London Business School and Christopher Bartlett of the Harvard Business School wrote in 1997 that companies must manage people individually and establish a new work contract.[31] On the one hand the company must allegedly recognize that personal development creates economic value: "market performance flows not from the omnipotent wisdom of top managers but from the initiative, creativity and skills of all employees".
On the other hand, employees should recognize that their work includes personal development and "... embrace the invigorating force of continuous learning and personal development".
[....]Further work on the career as a personal development process came from study by Herminia Ibarra in her Working Identity on the relationship with career change and identity change,[33] indicating that priorities of work and lifestyle continually develop through life.
Personal development programs in companies fall into two categories: the provision of employee benefits and the fostering of development strategies.
Employee benefits have the purpose of improving satisfaction, motivation and loyalty. Employee surveys may help organizations find out personal-development needs, preferences and problems, and they use the results to design benefits programs.Typical programs in this category include:
Many such programs resemble programs that some employees might conceivably pay for themselves outside work: yoga, sports, martial arts, money-management, positive psychology, NLP, etc.
As an investment, personal development programs have the goal of increasing human capital or improving productivity, innovation or quality. Proponents actually see such programs not as a cost but as an investment with results linked to an organization’s strategic development goals. Employees gain access to these investment-oriented programs by selection according to the value and future potential of the employee, usually defined in a talent management architecture including populations such as new hires, perceived high-potential employees, perceived key employees, sales staff, research staff and perceived future leaders.Organizations may also offer other (non-investment-oriented) programs to many or even all employees. Typical programs focus on career-development, personal effectiveness, teamwork, and competency-development. Personal development also forms an element in management tools such as personal development planning, assessing one's level of ability using a competency grid, or getting feedback from a 360 questionnaire filled in by colleagues at different levels in the organization.
