3 Streams of Personal Development

In this article I have outlined 3 streams of personal development that we need to be aware of and constantly working on if we are interested in our own personal growth.

Let me know what you think.

1. Motive: by motive I mean, what is your motive for participation. What drives your behavior? What state of consciousness do you operate from? For example, are you contracted or relaxed, is your participation reluctant or wholehearted, do you try to “get” or do you try to “create” and if you are creating are you structuring that creation on scarcity or abundance, does the perception that there’s something wrong drive your behavior or are you excited and interested at the same time? These are some of the things that we need to consider when it comes to motive and our states of consciousness.

2. Means: by means, I refer to skillful means. Not necessarily a skill as in something you might be good at like landscaping, carpentry or mathematics, but more skillful means; do you have the knowledge, the abilities as well as the skills to be able to take on multiple perspectives for greater understanding, better cooperation and more effective results? Are you constantly working at refining your natural abilities for greater focus while developing your understanding of ideologies, belief systems and patterns of thinking that limit your development so that you can begin to expand your awareness for new, more useful ways of thinking, acting and communicating?

3. Maturity: a lot of maturity has to do with intelligence. And by intelligence, I don’t mean in the traditional sense as in terms of your IQ. I mean your level of psychological development. Your level of maturity pertains to your ability to understand and integrate multiple worldviews, ideologies as well as understanding the structures and systems in which you operate. For example, say a company director develops a highly sophisticated marketing strategy which he hands over to his marketing manager to implement. The marketing manager however is operating from 2 levels below the level of psychological development of the director. The end result is a marketing campaign that looks very different to the original one. To the marketing manager however, it couldn’t be better, in fact he probably thinks he’s enhanced the original.

These are the 3 levels we need to consider when thinking about more or less useful ways of interacting with the multiple situations we face on a daily basis, as well as what is serving our growth, and what is perhaps limiting us from moving up to higher levels of development.