The internal or external source of personal change is an important question.
Growth is often understood as a process of natural unfolding of something internal, these are changes that occur as a result of the natural unfolding in a person of what is inherent in him by nature or has become his second nature. Growth is something that has an internal source. If a boy naturally matured into a man, this is more about personal growth. What if the source of change is outside? For example, the boy did not like to study, but the teacher took him seriously, used pedagogical technologies and taught and taught the boy to learn. The boy’s ability to learn has definitely increased, but shall we call it the boy’s personal growth?
The answers will be very different.
If a man is prone to accuracy, then the answer is no. “This is personal development, not personal growth.” If a man, as often happens, is not interested in the details of the process, he does not care in what way and only the result is important, he will say yes. “The indicators have increased, which means that personal growth is evident.”
If a woman pays attention to the process, she will rather answer — no. “Personal growth should be natural, and artificial coaching is not personal growth.” Women do not like artificial, women prefer everything natural. If a woman does not gravitate towards strict logical constructions and rather relies on evidence, she can easily agree: “Yes, he has changed a lot, wonderful personal growth!”
Female look
According to the female vision, a person is a person with a rich inner world who knows how to feel, love and forgive.
“What is personal growth? If a person has more: — interests, and with it incentives to live — the semantic content of life, — the ability to analyze — to distinguish one from the other, — the ability to synthesize — to see the connections of events and phenomena, — understanding people (including oneself), and with this, the ability to forgive, — inner freedom and independence, — responsibility taken on voluntarily, — love for the world and people (including oneself), this means that a person grows personally. Synonyms: mentally, spiritually. (V. Levy from the book “Where to Live. A Man in the Chains of Freedom.”)
Personal growth for a woman is something that happens inside, a deep process. Life events can only push for personal growth, and external indicators can only be an expression of the fact that internal events have occurred in a person. Personal growth in a feminine way is an internal event, it is rather subjective and is felt first of all by the person himself.
Accordingly, if a woman feels that she has changed internally, she will claim that her personal growth has occurred. «I feel like I’m on the mend.»
K. Riff, who proposed the well-known six-component model of psychological well-being. she indicated personal growth as one of the components, defining it as “a feeling of continuous development and self-realization”. Do you hear? Feeling…
Women pay attention mainly to whether there have been significant changes in the process of self-awareness, experience and lifestyle.
Suppose the girl was an ordinary office worker, earned $ 500, was afraid of heights and the dark, and was sure that she was an ordinary gray mouse. After completing the training, she stopped being afraid of heights and darkness, discovered the talent of an artist in herself, left her job and began to sell her paintings. She’s making the same $500, but now she’s ecstatic. She herself and all her friends are sure that very serious, real qualitative changes have taken place with her. She says that life opened up before her. From the female point of view, from the point of view of the processor, the results are enormous. Even if we doubt the qualitative change in her life, hardly anyone will dispute her talk about her personal growth.
Women rarely care about the accuracy of terminology, and in this case you really can’t figure it out: from the inside, in an experience, personal growth and personal development with their quantitative or qualitative changes cannot be distinguished. When a girl wants to emphasize that she has changed a lot, she will talk about qualitative changes and even call it personal development. If it is important for her to note that all this came from within her, and was not formed by external procedures, she will call it personal growth.
Male look
In men and in science, since science is done mainly according to male patterns — in a different way. According to the male model and according to the male (scientific) vision, a person is a responsible subject of will, one who is able to do his own strongly and responsibly. Personal growth in a manly way, these are external results that can be objectively assessed or measured.
These are objective changes in his personality (visible by eye or recorded by tests) or objective changes in his relationships and life (obvious, like his new car or a more decent girlfriend, or recorded by a survey of others)
Accordingly, if a man has something to present as a reality, if there are objective, externally fixed and socially recognized results, personal growth has occurred for him. And if there is nothing to present, there was nothing. Feelings don’t count.
Men, as result workers, pay attention mainly to the result: whether there have been changes in objective, external, final indicators.
The young man was a manager, earned $ 500, he was afraid of heights and darkness and had little faith in himself. After passing the trainings, he stopped being afraid of heights and darkness, discovered the talent of an artist in himself, left work for free swimming and began to sell his paintings: he has $ 500 a month. So what? He did not become a super-popular and sold artist, from the fact that he is now not afraid of heights, little has really changed in his life. Yes, very serious processes and changes took place inside him, but for the girls he was a young man with limited financial resources, and he remained that way. Only the unordered life of the artist has been added… From the male point of view, from the point of view of the resultant, there are no results.
Internal personal growth, perhaps, happened to him, only its value for a man is small.
Everything is very subjective, for more on this, see →
Feminine and masculine approach to self-improvement
Working on themselves in a spontaneous way, men often go from external to internal, from behavior to feeling. Women usually go the opposite way: it is internal to external, from feeling to behavior … See →