Tag: personal-growth

The Present Moment

Where Understanding Becomes A Life

We spend surprisingly little of our lives anywhere other than the present. That statement sounds obvious. Physically, where else could we be? And yet our attention can spend enormous amounts of time somewhere else. We revisit conversations that have already happened. We replay mistakes. We remember people who are gone. We imagine different versions of choices we already made. At the other end, we anticipate what might happen tomorrow, next month or ten years from now. We plan, worry, hope, prepare and imagine.

None of those things are inherently problems. The past contains experience. The future gives us direction. But neither is where we live. Everything we have ever actually done has happened in a present moment. That makes the present considerably more important than simply being the space between yesterday and tomorrow. It is where everything eventually has to become real.

The Past Is Something We Can Learn From

Looking backward has value. Our experiences contain information. If we want to understand ourselves, we often have to examine where we’ve been. What happened? What did we do? What did we feel? What choices worked? Which ones didn’t? What patterns are repeated? What did an experience teach us that we couldn’t have understood before living through it? Reflection allows experience to become knowledge.

But there is a difference between returning to the past to retrieve something and continuing to live there after we’ve retrieved it. We cannot change what happened. We may change our understanding of it. We may repair consequences that still exist. We may grieve it, learn from it, forgive something, refuse to forgive something, accept it, reinterpret it or discover years later that we misunderstood part of it. But eventually whatever we discover has to come back with us. Otherwise reflection becomes repetition. We keep visiting the same room without bringing anything useful out of it.

The Future Gives Us Somewhere To Go

The future serves a different purpose. We need the ability to look ahead. Goals require it. Planning requires it. Responsibility requires it. If we want to become something different from what we currently are, we need some ability to imagine what that difference might look like.

But the future presents its own trap. We can become so concerned with where we’re going that the present becomes nothing more than an obstacle between ourselves and the life we imagine having later. We’ll be satisfied when we achieve the goal. We’ll relax when the problem is solved. We’ll appreciate ourselves when we’ve changed enough. We’ll enjoy life when circumstances improve. There is always another condition. And because the future continually becomes the present when it arrives, we can spend an entire life waiting for a moment in which we finally allow ourselves to live.

Non-Attachment Doesn’t Keep Us From Caring

This is one place where my understanding of non-attachment becomes useful. Non-attachment does not require us to become indifferent to the past or unconcerned with the future. We can treasure what happened without requiring it to still be happening. We can work toward something tomorrow without requiring tomorrow to unfold exactly as we imagined. We can love what is currently in our lives while understanding that its presence is not guaranteed forever.

That includes people. Circumstances. Bodies. Careers. Possessions. Identities. Even the version of ourselves standing here today. Everything changes. The present moment asks us to participate fully in what exists without confusing appreciation with permanent possession. That can make appreciation stronger rather than weaker. When we stop assuming something will always be available, we may finally begin noticing that it is available now.

Perspective Requires Movement

There is another reason the present matters within personal development. Sometimes we need to leave our ordinary perspective. We may need to descend. That can mean examining pain, memory, fear, emotional patterns, unconscious motives or parts of ourselves we would rather avoid. There are things we cannot understand from the surface.

At other times we need to move in the opposite direction. We need distance. We need a higher vantage point. We need to step back far enough to see the larger pattern. A problem that consumes our entire field of vision from one position may look very different when viewed as one event within a year, a decade, a relationship, a developmental process or an entire life. Both movements can be valuable.

Depth gives us information that the surface can hide. Perspective gives us relationships that proximity can hide. But neither movement completes the process. Eventually we have to come back.

The Present Is The Ground We Return To

This return is something I consider essential. There is little developmental value in discovering profound things about ourselves if those discoveries never alter the way we live. We can understand why we become angry. Then someone irritates us today. What do we do? We can understand our attachment patterns. Then we face the possibility of losing something important. What do we do? We can develop elaborate philosophies about compassion. Then somebody difficult is standing directly in front of us. What do we do? We can understand boundaries intellectually. Then someone crosses one. What do we do?

This is where development stops being theoretical. The present moment is where understanding encounters circumstance. It is where knowledge becomes choice. Where values become behavior. Where intention becomes action. Where philosophy encounters consequence. Where the person we believe ourselves to be meets the person we actually demonstrate ourselves to be.

Insight Has To Survive Contact With Life

It is relatively easy to understand ourselves while sitting alone thinking about ourselves. Life provides the test. We return from reflection with an idea about ourselves, and then circumstances give us opportunities to see whether it holds. Sometimes it does. Sometimes we discover that we aren’t as patient as we believed. Or as independent. Or as compassionate. Or as disciplined.

Sometimes the opposite happens. We discover that something which once controlled us no longer does. A situation that would once have overwhelmed us becomes manageable. A boundary we once couldn’t maintain becomes natural. A decision that once required enormous effort becomes simply what we do. Those moments matter because development has moved from understanding into embodiment. We aren’t merely thinking differently. We are living differently.

The Present Is Also Where Small Things Accumulate

We tend to notice dramatic transformations. Life is often built through much smaller ones. One workout. One conversation. One refusal. One apology. One hour spent learning. One decision not to repeat an old behavior. One moment in which we notice what we’re doing and choose differently. None may appear particularly significant by itself. But our lives are composed of these moments.

A goal may exist months away. The behavior that reaches it happens today. A relationship may develop over years. The relationship is being created through the interaction happening now. Character may seem like something enormous and abstract. Much of it is simply the accumulation of choices made when circumstances repeatedly ask us who we’re going to be. The present is where those answers are given.

We Don’t Have To Trap Ourselves In The Present Either

There is a strange contradiction that can occur when people begin emphasizing present-moment awareness. Even being present can become another rigid rule. We don’t need to stop remembering. We don’t need to stop planning. We don’t need to eliminate imagination, anticipation, reflection or concern. The ability to mentally move through time is useful.

The question is whether we know why we’re going somewhere and whether we know how to return. We can visit the past to learn. We can look toward the future to orient ourselves.  We can descend to understand what lies beneath us. We can rise above a situation to gain perspective. But eventually our feet have to touch the ground again. Because this is where our life is waiting.

Every Moment Matters

Perhaps one of the simplest developmental questions we can ask is: What am I doing with what I know right now? Not, what did I once understand? Not, what do I intend to become someday? What am I doing with it now? If we’ve learned something from the past, where is it visible in our present behavior? If we have a goal for the future, what are we doing today that moves toward it? If we’ve gained a new perspective, how does it change the way we interact with what is directly in front of us? If we’ve discovered something within ourselves, what does that discovery actually change? And if something matters to us, are we appreciating its presence while it is still here? We cannot remain in a single moment. Even the moment in which these words are being read is already passing. That doesn’t make the present meaningless. It makes it valuable.

The past gives us experience. The future gives us possibility. Depth can give us understanding. Perspective can give us a wider view. But the present is where all of them meet. It is where we choose. It is where we act. It is where we experience the people and things we claim to value. And it is where everything we have learned eventually has to become part of the life we are actually living.

We can look backward. We can look forward. We can look inward. We can look outward and above. But sooner or later, personal development asks us to return our attention to the ground beneath our feet and answer a much more immediate question: Now that we can see more clearly, what are we going to do with where we are?

Learning To See Yourself

Observation Without Immediate Judgement

One of the hardest things we can learn to do for ourselves is how to look without immediately deciding what we are looking at. That sounds simple. It isn’t. We observe ourselves constantly, but observation and interpretation are not the same thing. Something happens. We experience an emotion, make a decision, react to another person, succeed at something, fail at something, or find ourselves repeating a familiar pattern.

Almost immediately, our minds begin explaining. I did that because… They did that because… This means… That’s just the kind of person I am. Sometimes the explanation is correct. Sometimes it contains part of the truth. Sometimes it is completely wrong. The problem isn’t interpretation. Interpretation is necessary if we want to understand anything. The problem is reaching an interpretation so quickly that we stop observing.

Learning To Look

A significant part of my own approach to personal development has involved learning to separate what I observe from what I believe those observations mean. That distinction gives us somewhere to begin. What actually happened? What did we think? What did we feel? What did we do? What were we expecting? What did we want? What were we afraid of? What happened afterward? These questions are different from immediately asking whether we were good or bad, right or wrong, justified or unjustified. Those judgments may have their place. But first, we need to see what happened.

There is an important reason for this. Once we become emotionally invested in an explanation, we tend to begin looking for evidence that supports it. New experiences are interpreted through conclusions we’ve already formed. We can become remarkably good at proving things to ourselves. That doesn’t necessarily make those things true.

Observation Is Not Passivity

Observing without immediate judgment does not mean refusing to make judgments. It doesn’t mean everything is acceptable. It doesn’t mean right and wrong don’t exist. And it certainly doesn’t mean endlessly analyzing ourselves while refusing to make decisions. It means allowing observation to come before conclusion.

In my own experience, intuition often functions this way. Something catches my attention. A behavior repeats. Something feels significant. Two apparently unrelated experiences begin to resemble one another. The message, as I have learned to treat it, is essentially: Pay attention to this. That is very different from: This is what it means.

We can apply the same distinction whether or not we describe the initial recognition as intuition. Something has caught our attention. Fine. Now we look. An observation can become a question. The question produces possibilities. Those possibilities can become hypotheses. Life then gives us opportunities to test them. Observe. Reflect. Recognize a pattern. Form an idea about what that pattern might mean. Test it. See what happens. Integrate what survives. Then return and observe again. The process is recursive because understanding ourselves changes the person doing the observing. We don’t return to exactly the same starting point.

We Are Both Observer And Observed

There is an obvious difficulty in self-observation: The person performing the experiment is also the experiment. We bring our memories with us. Our desires. Our fears. Our wounds. Our expectations. Our beliefs. Our previous conclusions. We cannot simply remove ourselves from ourselves and become perfectly objective observers. But perfect objectivity isn’t required. What we can do is become increasingly aware of the lenses through which we are looking.

Suppose someone says something that makes us angry. Our first observation might simply be: I became angry. Before deciding what the anger proves, we can become curious about it. What exactly triggered the anger? Was it what the person said? How they said it? What we believed they meant? What we expected them to say next? Was the anger entirely about what happened today? Did the interaction resemble something older? Were we defending a principle? Protecting a boundary? Defending our pride? Were we frightened? Embarrassed? Exhausted? There may be more than one answer. Human beings are complicated enough to have several motives, emotions and interpretations operating simultaneously.

The purpose isn’t to interrogate ourselves until every emotion disappears. The purpose is to understand enough about the machinery producing our response that we have more choice in what happens next.

Motives Matter

Behavior tells us something. Motive tells us something else. Two people can perform exactly the same action for completely different reasons. The same is true within ourselves. We can help someone because we genuinely care about them. We can help because we want to feel needed. We can help because we’re afraid they’ll leave if we don’t. We can help because helping them benefits us. And sometimes several of those motives can exist at once. Human motives are not obligated to be simple. That is why honest self-observation eventually requires something more difficult than merely noticing our behavior.

We have to become willing to ask: Why am I doing this? And then we have to become willing to discover that our first answer may not be our deepest one. This is also where immediate judgment can interfere with discovery. If we punish ourselves every time we uncover an unattractive motive, we create an incentive to stop looking for unattractive motives. We begin protecting ourselves from our own observations. That isn’t greater self-awareness. It is teaching ourselves what not to see.

Learning To Use The Mirror

I frequently use the mirror as a model for personal development because there is something useful about what a mirror does. A mirror does not need to approve of our reflection. It simply allows us to see it. What we do with that information comes afterward. We may dislike what we see. We may appreciate it. We may decide something needs to change. We may discover that something we’ve spent years trying to change never needed changing in the first place. But before any of those decisions become useful, we have to be willing to look.

And looking becomes considerably harder when identity becomes involved. If we need to believe that we are always compassionate, we may have difficulty recognizing our capacity for cruelty. If we need to believe that we are strong, we may have difficulty seeing our fear. If we identify completely with independence, we may have difficulty recognizing where we have become dependent. The opposite can be equally distorting. If we have decided that we are weak, broken, selfish or incapable, we may reinterpret evidence of strength, development or generosity so that it continues supporting the identity we’ve already accepted. Positive and negative self-images can both distort the mirror. The question isn’t whether we should have an identity. The question is whether our identity remains capable of receiving new information.

Patterns Require Time

One observation tells us that something happened once. It does not necessarily tell us why. Repeated observations begin to reveal patterns. That is why I place considerable value on looking at ourselves longitudinally—across time rather than only through the intensity of a particular moment. What happens repeatedly? Under what conditions? What changes it? What makes it stronger? What makes it disappear? What happens when we deliberately respond differently? Now self-observation begins turning into experimentation. If we believe a particular behavior comes from a particular motive, we can change something and observe whether the pattern changes.

Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe the result reveals that our explanation was incomplete. That isn’t necessarily failure. We learned something. And that new information becomes part of the next observation.

Other People Are Mirrors Too

We don’t learn about ourselves exclusively by sitting alone and thinking. Other people provide information. Relationships provide information. Conflict provides information. Success and failure provide information. The way we behave when frightened may show us something that peaceful reflection never could. The way we behave when given authority may reveal something that powerlessness could not. The way we respond to rejection, affection, responsibility, criticism, praise, loss or opportunity may expose parts of ourselves that were invisible under different conditions.

Other people’s perceptions can also provide useful information. But they remain observations from another position. Someone else’s interpretation of us should not automatically become our identity any more than our first interpretation of ourselves should automatically become truth. We can listen. We can compare. We can test. We can look for repetition. We can ask whether the reflection contains something we couldn’t see from where we were standing. The mirror provides information. We still have to decide what that information means.

We Are Allowed To Be Wrong About Ourselves

This may be one of the most useful permissions we can give ourselves. We are allowed to discover that something we believed about ourselves was wrong. We are allowed to discover that we misunderstood our motives. We are allowed to discover that something we once considered a strength has become a limitation. We are allowed to discover that something we considered a weakness contained a strength we hadn’t yet learned how to use. We are even allowed to discover that an understanding that was once accurate is no longer accurate because we have changed. Personal development requires the possibility of being surprised by ourselves. Otherwise, self-examination becomes little more than repeatedly confirming an identity we’ve already decided upon.

Seeing Creates Choice

The ultimate purpose of observation is not endless introspection. It is choice.

Things we cannot see can still influence us. Patterns we cannot recognize can still repeat. Motives we refuse to examine can still direct our behavior. The more clearly we can observe what is happening within us, the more opportunity we have to decide what we want to do with it. Sometimes we change what we find. Sometimes we accept it. Sometimes we strengthen it. Sometimes we redirect it. Sometimes we discover that the thing we were fighting was never actually the problem. And sometimes we simply gather more information because we don’t know enough yet. There is no requirement that every observation immediately become a conclusion. There is no requirement that every question immediately receive an answer.  Sometimes the most useful thing we can say is: I noticed this. I don’t know what it means yet. I’m going to keep looking. That leaves the door open. And if our purpose is genuinely to know ourselves rather than merely confirm what we already believe, that open door matters.

Personal development can begin in many places, but one of the simplest is also one of the hardest: Learn to look at yourself long enough to see what is actually there before deciding what it means. Then keep looking. Because the person looking into the mirror today is not necessarily the same person who will be standing there tomorrow.

The Highs and Lows of Life.

While psychology and esoteric systems can sometimes diverge depending on your perspective, there are two areas in which both sides often seem to encounter similar developmental territory: descent and ascension.

Many older traditions, particularly those concerned with depth, shadow, initiation, and transformation, contain journeys into darkness, underworlds, death and rebirth, ordeals, confrontations with monsters, periods of isolation, and symbolic dismemberment followed by reconstruction.

Psychology has its own languages for confronting painful, avoided, unconscious, contradictory, or previously unintegrated material. We descend. Into history. Into emotion. Into patterns. Into fear. Into the unconscious. Into whatever darkness lies beneath the person we presently experience ourselves to be.

The explanations aren’t identical.  But the developmental principle is recognizable: Sometimes you cannot understand what is happening on the surface without exploring what lies underneath it.

A reaction may have a history. A belief may have been formed under circumstances you’ve forgotten. A strength may have grown from something painful. A behavior that causes problems today may once have solved a problem extremely well. So, we descend.

This is not necessarily movement backward in the developmental sense. It is movement toward depth. You follow the present downward into what helped create it. And there are things worth finding there. But finding them isn’t enough. You must carry them back.

The objective isn’t to construct a permanent home at the bottom of the spiral. The objective is to return to where you began with something you didn’t possess when you left. Understanding. Awareness. Acceptance. A different interpretation. A lesson. A choice. A recovered part of yourself. Whatever was found at depth must encounter the present person before it can become part of present life.

The Other Side of Experience

A great deal of spiritual language also points upward. Higher consciousness. Higher Self. Ascension. Transcendence. Enlightenment. Liberation.

The imagery is understandable. Height gives us perspective. Rising above something allows us to see relationships that may be invisible while standing inside them. Many spiritual traditions therefore associate development with ascent—with reaching beyond the limitations of our ordinary perspective toward something greater.

As we move upward conceptually, perspective expands. From close enough, an event can occupy your entire field of vision. Move farther away and it becomes one event among many. Move farther still and relationships between events become visible. Patterns appear. What seemed random may acquire context. What seemed overwhelmingly important may become smaller. What seemed insignificant may reveal itself as part of something much larger. This is one reason spiritual and contemplative traditions have always been attracted to the symbolism of ascent. Higher perspective can change understanding.

But there is a danger here too. Perspective can become distance.

If the objective becomes permanently escaping the ordinary human condition—escaping the body, emotion, difficulty, responsibility, relationship, limitation, or material life—then the very perspective that was supposed to expand life can become a means of withdrawing from it. I don’t regard transcendence as useless. I question transcendence that never returns. If you climb high enough to see something that couldn’t be seen from the ground, then bring what you saw back to the ground. That is where it becomes practical.

A spiritual realization should eventually encounter behavior. A philosophical understanding should eventually encounter decisions. Greater consciousness should eventually encounter ordinary relationships. Expanded perspective should eventually encounter responsibility. Whatever happens in meditation eventually encounters the person who gets up from meditation. Whatever happens during ritual eventually encounters the person who leaves the ritual space. Whatever is learned in solitude eventually encounters another human being. Whatever is discovered beyond the ordinary perspective eventually has to be expressed through an ordinary life if it is going to become part of that life.

The Present Is the Point of Contact

It could be easy to misunderstand this and think the present is simply a neutral midpoint between darkness below and light above. For me, this is where spirituality and personal development become inseparable. Below you is depth. Above you is perspective. You can travel downward to understand what lies beneath your present condition. You can travel upward to see your present condition from increasingly larger perspectives.

But the life you are actually living is occurring here. In the present.

That makes the present something more than the starting point of the journey. It is the place where what you discover elsewhere becomes capable of affecting your life. You can descend into the past and discover why a particular pattern exists. Useful. But eventually you must return to the present and ask:

What am I going to do differently now that I understand it?

You can ascend into an extraordinary spiritual perspective and experience yourself, humanity, consciousness, or existence in a completely different way. Useful. But eventually you must return and ask:

How does someone who has seen that live differently tomorrow morning?

Without that return, insight can remain insight. Integration requires embodiment. That makes the present the grounds of integration.

It is where the different directions meet. It is where information becomes choice. It is where perspective becomes action. It is where understanding becomes behavior. It is where the past encounters the possibility of a different future. It is where the spiritual encounters the physical. It is where whatever you believe about consciousness, soul, meaning, or existence must encounter the fact that right now you are also a human being living a human life.

You descend. You return. You ascend. You return. And each return potentially changes the person standing there. You can encounter similar territory repeatedly while experiencing it from a different depth or height. You may return to an old question years later and discover that it is no longer asking quite the same thing, because you are no longer the same person asking the question. Extraordinary experiences can be valuable. So can profound psychological insights. So can symbolic experiences, difficult confrontations with yourself, periods of contemplation, and moments when your perspective seems to expand beyond anything you previously understood. Because I believe greater depth and greater perspective can help us become increasingly capable of engaging with life and being human deliberately.

Where Psychology and Esoteric Practice Meet.

For much of human history, people have developed practices intended to change themselves. They have meditated, prayed, fasted, performed rituals, contemplated symbols, worked with breath and movement, undertaken initiations, refined the body, studied philosophy, entered periods of solitude, confronted fears, practiced disciplines, and attempted, in a variety of other ways, to understand parts of themselves that ordinary daily life did not necessarily reveal.

Today, we have another language available for examining human development: psychology.

Psychology has given us increasingly sophisticated ways of discussing cognition, emotion, behavior, attention, identity, personality, development, the unconscious, relationships, trauma, motivation, and many other dimensions of human experience.

But something I have discovered through my own development is that the psychological and the esoteric do not necessarily have to be competing ways of looking at the same person. In my own experience, psychology often provided language and conceptual structure for understanding processes that I had already begun exploring through esoteric practice. The practices came first. The psychological understanding frequently came later.

Spiritual Development Is Still Personal Development

This is ultimately why I use the term personal development so broadly. If a chosen practice changes your relationship with your thoughts, that concerns personal development. If it develops discipline over your behavior, that concerns personal development. If it changes your relationship with your emotions, that concerns personal development. If it causes you to examine identity, meaning, mortality, values, purpose, or your relationship with something greater than yourself, that concerns personal development too.

The spiritual dimension does not have to be removed from the person for the psychological aspect to be worth examining. And the psychological dimension does not automatically invalidate the spiritual aspect. They are different lenses. Sometimes they point toward different conclusions. Sometimes they reveal different levels of the same experience. Sometimes they genuinely disagree. The objective isn’t to force every field into a single vocabulary. It is to learn what each perspective allows us to see.

Different Languages, Overlapping Territory

I don’t believe psychology and esoteric traditions are interchangeable. Psychology is not simply modern terminology for magic. And reducing every spiritual or esoteric experience to a psychological mechanism can remove precisely the dimension that makes the experience meaningful to the practitioner. At the same time, an esoteric interpretation doesn’t eliminate the psychological processes occurring within the person practicing it.

 Both perspectives can sometimes be useful.

Consider meditation. Meditation existed as a spiritual and contemplative practice for thousands of years before modern psychology began systematically studying it. Today, psychological research can examine aspects of meditation in terms of attention, awareness, acceptance, stress responses, and emotional regulation. That psychological description doesn’t necessarily tell a Buddhist, yogi, occultist, mystic, or other practitioner everything that meditation means within their tradition. But neither does the spiritual interpretation prevent us from recognizing that practicing meditation develops psychological capacities.

Both statements can be true without requiring one to replace the other.

Practice Can Precede Explanation

This has been particularly important in understanding my own development. Many of the skills I later learned to describe using psychological terminology were not originally developed by sitting down and deciding to practice psychology.

They developed through practice. Meditation. Concentration. Somatic practices. Breathe work. Visualization. Symbolic work. Ritual. Self-observation. Emotional work. Auric-based energetic practices. Contemplation. Working deliberately with different states of consciousness and different perspectives upon my own experience.

Some of those practices were explicitly spiritual or esoteric in purpose. Yet practicing them repeatedly also required me to develop things that psychology can discuss perfectly well. Research on mindfulness provides a particularly clear example of this overlap: practices with contemplative roots are now studied in relation to attention, metacognitive awareness, emotional regulation, cognitive flexibility, and rumination.  That doesn’t mean every esoteric practice produces those particular effects.

It demonstrates something more basic: A practice can belong to one tradition while developing capacities that can also be understood through another field.

Symbols Are More Than Decorations

Symbolism is another area where the boundaries become interesting. Human beings have used symbolic figures for an extraordinarily long time. Gods. Animals. Heroes. Monsters. Elements. Planets. Colors. Directions. Numbers. Myths. And various other things as well.

Whatever metaphysical status someone assigns to those things, symbols can also function as ways of organizing information about experience. A symbol can hold several associations simultaneously. An animal might represent qualities of behavior, instinct, emotion, strength, vulnerability, relationship, or environment. A mythological figure can represent an entire collection of characteristics and relationships in a form that is easier to contemplate than a list of abstract definitions. That is one reason symbolism became important within my own personal-development framework.

I wasn’t interested merely in collecting interesting symbols. I was interested in what happened when I worked with them. What qualities did I personally associate with them? Why? What did my interacting with them reveal? What changed over time?

At that point, symbolic practice becomes something that can be explored psychologically without requiring the practitioner to abandon its spiritual meaning.

Ritual as Deliberate Practice

The same is true of ritual. The word can sound mysterious, but ritual itself is hardly foreign to human behavior. Psychology recognizes ritual both in clinical contexts and, more broadly, as ceremonial behavior involving structured actions and words; anthropology has long examined religious, magical, calendrical, and initiatory rituals as well.

From a personal-development perspective, ritual can provide a deliberately constructed environment for attention. You determine what you are doing. You establish an intention. You create a sequence. You concentrate upon particular ideas, symbols, emotions, or actions. You repeat practices. You observe what happens.

For an esoteric practitioner, considerably more may be occurring. That’s where I think intellectual humility becomes useful. Psychology can tell us something about what the human being is doing. A spiritual or esoteric tradition may offer another explanation for what the practitioner is experiencing and believes is occurring.

You don’t necessarily have to destroy one explanation in order to investigate the other.

You Don’t Have to Settle the Universe First

There is a tendency when discussing spirituality, psychology, mysticism, consciousness, or esoteric practices to immediately arrive at the largest possible argument:

But what is ultimately real?

That’s an important question. It is also not always the first question that needs answering. You don’t have to settle every metaphysical question before asking whether a certain practice teaches you something useful about yourself. Are you more aware? More disciplined? More compassionate? More capable of recognizing your own patterns? More capable of directing your behavior? More capable of living according to what you claim to value? Has your relationship with yourself improved? Has your relationship with other people changed? Can you apply what you learned when life becomes difficult?

If the answer is yes, then something experienced elsewhere has begun to become integrated here. Because whatever language we use—psychological, philosophical, spiritual, symbolic, or esoteric—the information eventually returns to the person having the experience.

That person still has to live. Still has to choose. Still has to act. Still has to integrate what was learned. For me, psychology has become an extremely useful framework for understanding parts of that process. Esoteric practice has been one of the major ways through which I experienced and developed within it. I don’t need either one to erase the other. I prefer to understand what I can learn from both.

What is Personal Development?

When people hear the words personal development, they often think of goal setting, motivation, productivity, career advancement, positive thinking, or becoming more successful. All those things can be part of personal development. But I believe the subject is considerably larger than any of them. At its simplest, personal development is exactly what the name suggests: The development of the person.

A career can develop. A relationship can develop. A business can develop. Skills can develop. But personal development asks a different question: How are you developing?

That distinction matters because every goal you pursue, every relationship you enter, every problem you encounter, and every decision you make has one thing in common. You are there. And wherever you go next, you will be there too.

Development Begins Within

I find it useful to begin by separating personal development into four broad internal areas:

Mental. Physical. Emotional. Spiritual.

These aren’t isolated compartments. They continually interact with and influence one another. Your knowledge and understanding affect the choices you make. Your physical condition affects what you’re capable of doing and experiencing. Your emotions influence perception, relationships, motivation, and behavior. Your beliefs, values, philosophy, and sense of meaning affect what you consider important enough to pursue in the first place. Development in one area can therefore affect several others.

The purpose isn’t to achieve some imaginary state of perfection in all four. It is to become increasingly aware of them and increasingly capable of deliberately participating in their development. 

That brings us to an important distinction worth understanding: Control vs Influence.

Control Within, Influence Without

We don’t live entirely within ourselves. We also participate in an external world containing finances, careers, families, relationships, communities, institutions, cultures, economies, and other people. Those systems have their own rules and structures. You cannot simply decide what the economy will do. You don’t personally control the hierarchy of an organization. You cannot make family members behave according to your wishes. You cannot dictate the decisions of everyone in your social environment.

Those things can exercise varying degrees of control over the conditions in which you live. But you can potentially influence them. And one of the most important ways of increasing that influence is by becoming better at governing yourself. That creates a useful distinction:

Within yourself, others can influence you, but developing control ultimately belongs to you.

Outside yourself, others and larger systems exercise control, but you retain the ability to influence them.

Personal development is partly about learning the difference. A tremendous amount of effort can be wasted attempting to control things that don’t belong to us while neglecting the things that do. The more effectively you can direct your own knowledge, behavior, emotional responses, discipline, values, choices, and actions, the greater your capacity may become to influence what happens around you.

You don’t gain control over the world. You become more capable of navigating it.

Knowing Is Not the Same as Developing

There is another distinction I consider important: Information is not development.

You can read a hundred books about discipline and remain undisciplined. You can understand communication and still communicate poorly. You can know exactly what habit you need to change and continue doing it every day. You can understand a pattern intellectually without having developed the ability to behave differently when that pattern appears again.

Knowledge matters. But knowledge must also encounter action. Action produces experience. Experience gives us something to observe. Observation allows us to recognize patterns, consequences, assumptions, strengths, weaknesses, contradictions, and possibilities that may not have been visible beforehand. Then what we learn can be incorporated into what we do next. That creates an ongoing developmental process rather than a collection of information.

You learn. You act. You experience. You observe. You adjust. Then you do it again.

There Is No Single Road

Personal development appears in far more places than just the modern self-help industry. It can be found in psychology and philosophy. It can appear through physical training, education, contemplative practice, relationships, professional development, spirituality, creative work, hardship, leadership, mentorship, and ordinary life experience. Different disciplines use different languages because they are often examining different parts of the same extraordinarily complicated subject: the human being.

I don’t believe everyone needs to follow the same path. People have different histories, personalities, abilities, circumstances, goals, beliefs, strengths, weaknesses, and ways of understanding the world. A useful framework should help someone explore those differences—not erase them. A map can provide orientation. It should not demand that everyone walking through the territory leave identical footprints.

The Objective Is Self-Direction

This is ultimately where personal development leads, in my view. Not toward becoming perfect. Not toward eliminating every difficulty. And certainly not toward becoming permanently dependent upon someone else to tell you what to think, what to choose, or where to go next.

The objective is to increase your capacity: to observe yourself, understand yourself, develop yourself, and direct yourself.

Teachers can teach. Coaches can coach. Books can provide information. Systems can provide structure. Other people can challenge you, encourage you, inspire you, question you, and occasionally show you something you couldn’t see from where you were standing.

But eventually the work returns to the same place. You.

Your choices. Your actions. Your responsibility. Your life. Personal development isn’t merely about getting more from life. It is about developing the person who is living it. And that process can continue for as long as you do.

Goals Are More Than Destinations

This is also why I look at goals somewhat differently. Obviously, if you set a goal, accomplishing it matters. But the result isn’t necessarily the only thing of value.

Ask yourself: Who would I have to become to accomplish this?

Perhaps the goal requires greater discipline. Maybe it requires learning something you don’t presently understand. Maybe it exposes an insecurity you’ve avoided confronting. Perhaps it requires patience, communication, physical development, emotional control, courage, better boundaries, or the willingness to abandon something that no longer serves you. Sometimes pursuing a goal even teaches you that the goal wasn’t really yours. That is useful information too. The destination provides direction; the journey provides experience. The true value of a goal lies not only in reaching it, but in the person you become on your way to achieving it.