Personal growth is a misused term; to properly explain this concept, we will share 6 personal growth and development examples from career to self-care and relationships with others.
Of course, growth means the same thing: an increase in size, value, strength or number according to the Collins dictionary, however, this can represent different things to different people.
For example; personal growth for human A can be losing weight while human B is focused on taking a break from the gym because he/she was drawing their entire identity from being fit and it was affecting them mentally that’s also growth.
Most times we hear about personal growth and development in the world and it’s almost synonymous with being wealthy, winning the Olympics, getting featured on the Forbes list and other achievements.
This is not wrong, however; the entire concept of personal development is beyond human achievements and validations.
The most crucial stage of personal development is the stage of self-awareness and acceptance.
Individuals who succeed in their growth journey assess their lives despite how painful they feel, accept their realities and decide to live better. You can’t skip this step, if you do, in the course of your growth journey, you will return to this stage because “you learn to walk before you run”
Personal growth and development examples
A funny fact about personal growth is, that you do it for yourself but somehow it benefits everyone around you except haters who don’t deserve to be in your space.
Personal growth starts with you, perhaps a decision you made in secret or in the presence of a therapist or loved one but somehow it turns around to announce you to the world and bring other visible benefits like; wealth, healthy relationships and more.
Hence, the world celebrates the visible evidence as personal growth when it’s simply the reward for a good job. Some personal growth and development examples include;
- Building resilience
According to the English dictionary, resilience is the ability to recover quickly from an illness or misfortune. It’s the ability to make lemonades when life gives you lemons.
As vital as this skill is, resilience is a lacking quality in the world that’s why the 1% in top positions are up while the 99% are struggling at average or the bottom.
Most people can’t seem to rise back up when they fall because they have lost their elasticity.
Life challenges have pulled their elasticity with nothing left. Some had businesses that fell and they couldn’t recover, others got laid off or had their life-savings taken and that was the last straw that broke the camel’s back.
Dreams, and beautiful goals, have been discontinued because the individuals gave up.
Unlike popular opinions, resilient individuals are not emotionless, they are the individuals who dare to embrace their shame and failures. They feel pain, cry at their loss, and give up for a season but the difference is they come back and try again.
- Fix your time management skills
Time management is another personal growth and development example. You have probably heard this before; “time is a currency but unlike money, it cannot be gotten back once it is spent”.
How you spend or invest your time determines your life returns, if you allow laziness or procrastination to control your time, your life will reek of incomplete tasks, pressure and huge losses.
The easiest way to cultivate good time management is to practice self-discipline. Obey your rules, build systems and learn to respect the time for each routine. Start with simple things like regulating your screen time to create free time to read more personal development books.
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Learn active listening
The underrated skill of active listening is a personal growth and development example that cuts across all facets of day-to-day communication including; social life, work and personal self-assessment.
If you can’t listen, you cannot understand!
Responding to someone doesn’t mean you hear or understand what they are saying. You can have an hour or more conversation with an individual but after 2-3 days you are both doing different things because no one was listening.
Stop listening to people to have the perfect response, listen to hear them, to comprehend the feelings, tone and implication behind each word they speak, this is what effective communication is all about.
Practising active listening makes you a good communicator, it shows the other person or group of people that you value their opinions and you can see from their point of view.
Active listening is not a form of people-pleasing, it is one of the most effective grounds for a mutual conversation.
- Work on your confidence
One of the biggest gifts you can give yourself is creating time to work on your confidence. Confident people lead, get jobs, run successful businesses and fill up big spaces that timid people are too scared to occupy.
Dearest gentle reader, you cannot afford to keep playing at the bottom level with omegas when you can be an Alpha or Beta. Just like every other personal growth and development example, confidence is a skill, it can be learnt.
The act of confidence is more of doing than reading, you would never learn to be confident by reading books without actually stepping out of your comfort zone to practice what you have read. Take baby steps, push past your fears, and with each fall or success, you become a more confident version.
- Develop a reading culture
The easiest route to frustration is becoming obsolete(out-of-date), every aspect of the world is evolving at a light pace and to keep, you must be informed. Create a system that can slip into your routine like reading early or right before bed.
Reading is a personal growth and development example you can personalise to suit your lifestyle. There are books to choose from, clubs to join and apps like Blinkist to summarise an entire book.
- Emotional intelligence
Do people call you insensitive? In a more formal term, they are casually calling you an emotionally unintelligent individual. Are they right?
An individual with emotional intelligence has respect for their personal feelings as well as the feelings of others. They respect people’s display of emotion while setting a high boundary between respect and people-pleasing.
Emotional intelligence is not reserved for couples, it’s a crucial element that should be upheld in relationships including work and friendships but remember, it starts with you.
Are you sensitive to your feelings? Do you push down the feelings of hurt, anger or resentment you feel? If this is you, subconsciously you put off the same energy to other people’s feelings or your show of concern is filled with ingenuity.
Learn to process not compress your feelings.
Takeaway
Life is a journey and every day should be lived with the heart to unlearn, learn and relearn. When you approach life as a journey with lessons, you start working on yourself and this process is called personal growth.
From cultivating empathy to building a healthy reading culture, personal growth and development examples are numerous, consistent and continuous. It is an ever-progressive cycle of growth, setbacks and a call to be better than you were yesterday.
