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As a strict scientific concept, «personal growth» has a difficult fate: different scientific schools put into it significantly different content, and psychological practice exploits it, in principle, caring little about the rigor of terminology.
That personal growth that is heard in popular books and in training advertising is, in principle, not a scientific concept, but a popular brand. Books are published devoted to (supposedly) personal growth, trainings are conducted (supposedly) for personal growth, while in fact books and trainings may not be entirely about personal growth. About what? About personal life, relationships, what to do with depression, how to find a job… All questions are important, vital, and books and trainings can be useful, but they can be attributed to the topic of personal growth only with the broadest interpretation of the term. And why they are all released under the heading «personal growth» is a marketing question. “Personal growth” is a fashionable concept, and under such a cap all these goods are sold better.
In modern psychology, personal growth is understood primarily as a measurable fact, as a result of significant and positive changes in a person’s personality. Whatever we call it — personal growth, personal growth, personal development, personal growth and development — all these are, first of all, positive changes in a person’s personality, strengthening the core and increasing the potential of the individual. It is not always clear what happened to a person, but in some cases it can be said that personal growth has occurred with a person. A person has become different, he has become better at managing his life, he has become stronger, deeper and richer inwardly. The main characteristics of personal growth and development are its direction, activity and scale.
V.L. wrote well about personal growth. Levy (from Where to Live: A Man in Chains of Freedom): 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.
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It is convenient to talk about personal growth and development by comparing personal growth trainings (personal development trainings) and business trainings, business-professional trainings. If participants learn knowledge and specific skills that are relevant to business, and the trainer does not touch the participants’ personalities, does not discuss their values and lifestyle, does not affect their attitude towards themselves and people, this is business training in its purest form. The participant learned how to advertise goods more efficiently and build working salary schemes, the participant mastered the skill of displaying goods and learned the text of a competent presentation — he can be more efficient in business, but as a person he remained the same, the tasks of personal growth and development were not there.
Unlike such specific skills trainings, which are essentially instrumental trainings, personal growth and development trainings work with the personality of the participants in the training. The form of work of such trainings can be very different. In trainings of a psychotherapeutic orientation, work is more often done with personal problems and fears of participants, helping to relieve mental pain and resentment, freeing them from psychological trauma and complexes. Personal development trainings no longer work with problems, but with the tasks of the participants, they teach you to see not problems, but opportunities, to live not according to patterns, but creatively, not to worry in vain, but to turn on your head and think, not to look for excuses and excuses, but to find solutions and take responsibility, to see people not as enemies and not to defend themselves from them, but to treat people kindly, quickly find friends and establish cooperative relationships. Personal development trainings teach participants to manage their emotions, live not in the past, but in the future, develop the author’s life position in the participants and raise questions of their personal values and life mission.
Criteria and indicators of personal growth are subjective and depend on who evaluates it, how it understands it and what pays attention to. These criteria will be different for representatives of various psychological schools and trends, for people with different psychotypes, for process and result workers, for men and women. Men in personal growth are more often interested in external results that can be objectively assessed or measured, for women, personal growth is rather subjective and is felt primarily by herself or people close to her.
Personal growth as a process of unfolding what is inherent in a person by nature
Dealing with the concept of “personal growth”, one must take into account the fact that some psychologists, primarily of the humanistic direction, put their own, rather specific content into this concept. Namely, they understand personal growth not so much as the result of positive changes in the personality, but as a special process, a special way of personality development. Based on the ideas of the positive nature of a person, characteristic of the works of K. Rogers and A. Maslow, they consider personal growth as a natural unfolding in a person of what is inherent in him by nature or has become his second nature. If we distinguish between “growth” as something natural and “development” as something that is largely set by the environment, then psychologists of this direction understand personal growth as something that grows in a person on its own, in contrast to what is set in a person by society in the process of socialization. .
A. Maslow wrote: “A teacher or culture does not create a person. They don’t instill in him the ability to love, or be curious, or philosophize, symbolize, create. Rather, they enable, favor, encourage, help what exists in the bud to become real and relevant” [17, p. 161].
It is precisely because of such linguistic confusion that a paradox is possible when not every personal growth is personal growth. Indeed, actual personal growth (by outcome) can be achieved in a variety of ways. For example, if an increase in the potential of the individual occurred as a result of the process of personality formation, as a result of the process of upbringing organized from the outside, then there was no process of personal growth, and the result — personal growth — is obvious.
Such a concept of personal growth, which opposes its development and personality formation, was born in the tradition of humanistic psychology and exists only within its framework: psychoanalytic or behavioral psychologists do not use such a concept of “personal growth”. In order not to be confused, we suggest that in cases where we are only interested in the result of personal growth and the path how it was achieved is not important, we use a more general concept: personal development.
Personal growth, pedagogy and health
The concept of «personal growth» turned out to be very important for the teachers of the school of V.V. Davydov, see →