The 5 areas of Personal Development and how to improve them
"We can't become what we need to be by remaining what we are." - Oprah Winfrey
Basic introduction to understand the context
Have you ever asked yourself "how can I become a better version of me?" 🧐 I know I have! And I know that becoming the best version of myself is not only good for me, but for the people around me too. So let's talk about how we can do that!
There are a few different frameworks for personal improvement, but the most common and complete one is the "5-areas framework". These five areas are: mental, social, emotional, spiritual, and physical.
I've met so many people who are great in one or two of these areas, but don't really focus on the others. Athletes who struggle with communication, students who miss out on human connections, professionals who don't know their purpose in life, and so on. If we really want to improve ourselves, we need to focus on all five areas. Let's do it!
1. Mental Development (long paragraph but worth it)
Our mind is the control tower of all our actions, therefore is so important to ensure its well-functioning and continuous growth. Our mental development will indeed affect our relationships, career, and studies.
Psychology is a vast and complex science, but a framework like the one proposed by Richard Barrett can help us understand our mind’s intrinsic needs. It is worth mentioning that human life cannot be 100% standardized and it is totally possible to find ourselves facing more needs at once regardless of the age-range.
Source: https://www.barrettacademy.com/stages-of-psychological-development
5 questions to ask ourself for mental development:
Am I feeling recognized by others?
Am I self-aware of my identity?
Am I aware of my purpose?
Am I connecting with others?
Am I serving humanity?
These are all questions that we could ask ourselves at any stage of life.
Ideas to improve our mental area: We need to ask questions about the world around us and at the same time question our inner-self.
Another important aspect to remember is that our brain which follows neural pathways to create habits (e.g., drinking alcohol when feeling sad, scream when feeling angry, etc.). The older we become the deeper these neural pathways will grow and this may prevent us to achieve a mental change.
More ideas to improve our mental area: We need to train our brain to become more elastic by creating different pathways. On one side we can cut our bad habits with determination and consistency (e.g., instead of drinking alcohol when angry we can go out for a walk). On the other hand, we can also exercise our brain to be flexible to change. We could learn a new language (speech area of our brain), learn to play an instrument (coordination and sound recognition), learn new dance moves (physical intelligence and balance), solve puzzles (visual-spatial working memory), play chess (strategic thinking), play online Trivia (quick mental reaction), start knitting (procedural memory)!
Source: https://www.greatmindsclinic.co.uk/blog/what-are-neural-pathways/
2. Social Development (start with reading this 😂)
Life is as complex as humans are. We need to improve our communication skills to achieve our goals more effectively and minimise possible negative outcomes of our social interactions. Effective and healthy communication is one of the most absent skills at many work environments, governmental institutions, and family circles. Knowing cultural differences, negotiation skills, public speaking, empathy, and situational analysis are just few of the many facets of social development.
Ideas to do to improve our social area: We could talk to the people we find inspiring in this area of life and ask them to teach us some of these precious social skills, we can go to a library or consult online resources to research how effective communication really works, finally we should practice what we have learned. Theory brings knowledge, practice brings change.
3. Emotional Development (the wheel is so cool 🤓)
Is being an emotionally strong person a good thing? Should we all become machines? Not at all, we just need to become better at managing our emotions, in order to prevent our emotions to take control over ourselves.
This is, for some of us, the most difficult area to develop: how we emotionally react to things is indeed not something that we can easily change.
We need to take some time to understand our emotions, we could print the emotions wheel and take a look back at it as soon as we are emotionally overwhelmed. Understand the type of emotion we feel is the first step of improvement journey. Believe me, spotting the emotions you are feeling is SO HARD for most people.
By psychologist Robert Plutchik
Ideas to improve our emotional area: We should journal about our emotions and analyse what went wrong or went well in some key past situations. Another action that we could do is to consult an expert on the subject depending on our need, we can talk to a personal coach, a spiritual leader, or a psychologist; all of them can help us to develop our emotional areas in different ways depending on different factors.
4. Spiritual Development (Better than you think 🙌🏼)
According to Oxford learner’s dictionary the spirit is “the part of a person that includes their mind, feelings, and character rather than their body”; Spirituality is instead defined as “the quality of being connected with religion or the human spirit”.
Based on the above definitions, we can deduct that Spirituality is a notion that makes sense whether we are religious or not at all. When we work on improving our spirituality, we are working on creating a deeper connection with the world around us; and this allows us to learn more about ourselves and what we really aim to do in life. Some experts say that we should deepen our spirituality even before improving all of the other areas.
Finally, the ‘religious view’ on spirituality comes surely handy. For example, in the Christian faith we find a deep description of the three key components of the human being: Body, Soul and Spirit. According to the Christian Bible our body is our physical matter, our soul is the unification of our emotions and character, and our spirit is described as same substance and image of God by which all human beings are created. According to this view, developing our spiritual well-being means to allow the spirit inside of us to get connected to God on a daily basis. In the picture we can see an example of the practicality of this view on the subject of spiritual development.
Ideas to improve our spiritual area: whatever may be our stage of life and our understanding of spirituality, we should seek to develop it: our inner-self is definitely more important than our outer-self. We should research this interesting topic and talk to a spiritual leader to understand how we, as humans, can start developing our spititual well-being.
Sources:
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/american_english/spirit_1
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/spirituality?q=Spirituality
Physical Development (Take time for yourself 🌱)
Our physical wellbeing is probably our most basic need we have, but we frequently forget it.
Ideas to improve our physical area: We could and should develop a good skincare routine, expose ourselves to sun to absorb vitamin B, we should get plenty of sleep and time of relaxation to ensure a good level of overall physical health. We can learn, according to our physical and medical condition, body balance and flexibility, we can learn a new sport, improve our coordination, ability to walk long distances, and learn how to swim. Finding and improving our physical wellbeing means exploring new possibilities to take care of our body.