The process of personal development can be intimidating and painstaking as we often must confront failures, challenges, and unknowns. But the process of self-development is as rewarding as is the outcome of fulfilling it.
The four D's of self-development are four simple steps you can take to begin actualizing yourself through your development. Below, I provide a brief overview of each step as a simple guide to help you commence your journey of self-discovery.
Determine
Before we can walk, we must first ground ourselves on our feet for stability and control. Similarly, before we are able take steps towards our self-development, we must ground ourselves in our core values.
Values represent our fundamental beliefs and what is most important to us. They are the principles that provide direction to us and inform our behaviors toward ourselves and our environments. Therefore, the first step to take in developing yourself is to define your values. Make the time to reflect on your beliefs, tendencies, likes, and dislikes. Note your strengths and any potential activities that will allow you to develop your natural, energetic tendencies with a degree of satisfaction. Strengths often overlap with our values and can be an important avenue for discovering what we value the most as we often find ourselves striving to improve them.
You should also make time to reflect on the sources of your motivation. Have a compassionate conversation with yourself as you reflect on your decisions and actions. Ask yourself, what inspires you? What do you resonate with? Try to identify surface and underlying motivations for your decisions and behaviors, and see what aligns with your emerging values. You can facilitate self-reflection by journaling your thoughts and engaging in introspection. Try to designate a place that is free of judgement and distractions for your mental space and personal development. This will promote an environment that will enable you to better tune into your inner voice as you contemplate things that are fundamentally important to you.
Discover
Once you define a set of core values that resonate with you, the next step is to raise your conscious awareness to discover possibilities that allow you to engage in activities that are you personally value.
As you attempt to unravel the several ways of engaging with your values through daily activities, try to cast a wide net around any potential avenues of engagement, even if it’s remotely relevant to you. Sometimes, what seems irrelevant or uninteresting can transform into a lifelong passion with some guidance and insight.
Decide
After you have defined your core values and discovered potential activities for actualizing them, you will need to revise your discoveries to pinpoint viable options. The point of this step is to utilize the decision-making process to translate your abstract values into concrete, actionable goals. Ultimately, the activity should create harmony between your internal psychological state and external environment through value-based behaviors.
One way of facilitating the decision-making process is by creating short-term and long-term goals. There are certain questions you can ask yourself to guide your decision-making and goal-setting process.
First, you should ask yourself if the goals are realistic, meaning if that they are achievable. Achievability can be determined by considering the amount of time, resources, and competing priorities you may have to invest towards your objectives. This may require you to reorient your goals, priorities, or resources to better align with what is attainable.
Another way of determining achievability is by breaking down goals into short-term benchmarks that can be maintained within a strict timeline. This will allow you to account for your progress and take practical steps that amount to landmark achievements overtime.
Another question to consider during this process is whether or not the activities of interest contain intrinsic value for you. In other words, would engaging in a particular activity be a rewarding experience without or before external reward? This is a question you can check against the number of options you have generated through the discovery phase to further refine your list of possibilities.
If you have not been able to narrow down to a singular option, then try to consider the general similarities or common themes between the remaining candidates. Ask yourself, what is it about these activities that symbolize my core values? This may require you to broaden your perspective to discern the overarching theme that relates to the different options.
Do
The fourth and last step involves taking action. Until this point, you may have been actualizing yourself and your purpose by proactively engaging with internal and external points of influence such as your strengths, tendencies, interests, members of your support group, hobbies, and other sources.
Now is the time to synchronize your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors into a holistic unit through contemplative action. Contemplative action is the process of self-reflecting and discerning meaning from experiences based on internal and external feedback from oneself and the environment as we act. This process will allow you to expand your insight and make any necessary adjustments along the way. It is also a means of determining whether your current pursuit is fulfilling your goals and values, or if you need to reorient yourself to pursue these outcomes using a different approach.
The process of self-development and discovery can be long and challenging. Humans are one of the most sophisticated and complex beings on Earth. So, do not be discouraged by setbacks you may encounter along your journey. Harness the value of failures and the lessons from shortcomings as stepping stones of your progress. Nothing worth pursuing is ever easy, and if there is anything, or rather, anyone worth pursuing in your life, it should be yourself.
Kommentare