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Personal development covers activities that improve awareness and identity, develop talents and potential, build human capital and facilitate employability, enhance the quality of life and contribute to the realization of dreams and aspirations. Personal development takes place over the course of a person's entire life. Not limited to self-help, the concept involves formal and informal activities for developing others in roles such as teacher, guide, counselor, manager, life coach or mentor. When personal development takes place in the context of institutions, it refers to the methods, programs, tools, techniques, and assessment systems that support human development at the individual level in organizations.
Among other things, personal development may include the following activities:
Improving self-awareness
Improving self-knowledge
Improving skills and/or learning new ones
Building or renewing identity/self-esteem
Developing strengths or talents
Improving a career
Identifying or improving potential
Building employability or (alternatively) human capital
Enhancing lifestyle and/or the quality of life and time-management
Improving health
Improving wealth or social status
Fulfilling aspirations
Initiating a life enterprise
Defining and executing personal development plans (PDPs)
Improving social relations or emotional intelligence
Spiritual identity development and recognition
Personal development can also include developing other people's skills and personality. This may take place through roles such as those of a teacher or mentor, either through a personal competency (such as the alleged skill of certain managers in developing the potential of employees) or through a professional service (such as providing training, assessment or coaching).
Beyond improving oneself and developing others, "personal development" labels a field of practice and research:
As a field of practice, personal development includes personal-development methods, learning programs, assessment systems, tools, and techniques.
As a field of research, personal-development topics appear in psychology journals, education research, management journals and books, and human-development economics.
Any sort of development — whether economic, political, biological, organisational or personal—requires a framework if one wishes to know whether a change has actually occurred.[3][need quotation to verify] In the case of personal development, an individual often functions as the primary judge of improvement or of regression, but validation of objective improvement requires assessment using standard criteria.
Personal-development frameworks may include:
Goals or benchmarks that define the end-points
Strategies or plans for reaching goals
Measurement and assessment of progress, levels or stages that define milestones along a development path
A feedback system to provide information on changes
As an industry
Personal development as an industry[4] has several business-relationship formats of operating. The main ways are business-to-consumer and business-to-business.[citation needed] However, two newer ways have emerged: consumer-to-business and consumer-to-consumer.[citation needed]
Business-to-consumer market
The business-to-consumer market involves selling books, courses and techniques to individuals, such as:
Newly-invented offerings in fields such as:
Fitness
Memory training
Beauty enhancement
Large-group awareness training
Weight loss
Traditional practices such as:
Yoga
Martial arts
Initiation ceremonies
Meditation
Spirituality
Asceticism
Some programs deliver their content online. Many include tools sold with a program, such as motivational books for self-help, recipes for weight-loss or technical manuals for yoga and martial-arts programs.
A partial list of personal development offerings on the business-to-individual market might include:
Books
Motivational speaking
e-Learning programs
Training workshops
Individual counseling
Life coaching
Time-management techniques
Business-to-business market
Some consulting firms specialize in personal development[5] but as of 2009 generalist firms operating in the fields of human resources, recruitment and organizational strategy have entered what they perceive as a growing market,[6] not to mention smaller firms and self-employed professionals who provide consulting, training and coaching.