What Is Personal Development?

How would you define personal development? This concept can be kind of a buzzword, but in this episode, I want to share the definition we’ll be using for Be School going forward.

Newsletter: taylorelyse.com/subscribe



Hotline BE:Text JOIN to +16506180711

Be School has always been a personal development podcast, but it took me a while to really own that truth. Once I finally started introducing myself as the host of a personal development podcast and the founder of a self-care company, I realized that I wasn’t entirely sure what personal development meant to me.



I created my own definition of self-care for Inner Workout. That definition changed my life and guides everything the organization builds.

What is personal development?

Personal development is just as much of a buzzword as self-care. I needed a guiding definition of personal development for Be School so that we didn’t get lost in all the buzziness. Ultimately, the simplest definition rang truest. 


Personal development is the process of becoming yourself.


Earlier iterations talked about personal development as becoming the best version of yourself or the highest version of yourself, but that didn’t sit right with me. You are not a machine to be optimized. You are a multidimensional human being.



Your richness and capacity for impact are already there. You simply need to uncover it.


If personal development is the process of becoming yourself...

How do you become yourself? 

I think that you become yourself through intentional inner work. That work broadly falls into three categories:

Unlearning

In this work, you’re letting go of the person that you think you ought to be. It can involve stepping into your own shadows to see where these beliefs began.

Learning

Here’s where you continually get to know yourself through tools like personality assessments, personal mission, vision, and values, metrics for success, and observation.

Growth

Growth highlights the space between who you are and how you’re currently showing up. It asks, “What needs to shift so that I can step into who I really am?”