Layers of Personality Development

Personality development is a very complicated topic on its own. There are numerous definitions of personality development. Personality in its simplest definition is a combination of mental, physical and behavioral characteristics and also characteristic patterns that we display in our everyday lives. Most people tend not to understand what personality development is and others go to the extent of actually ignoring its importance entirely. Personality is recognized most often in the environment of our professions. You will find that most employers will train their staff in various skillsets; like communications, leadership, critical thinking and resourcefulness (among many others). This is what they refer to as professional development but for our purposes today we can think of professional development and personality development as congruent examples.

This may be true, but further examination will reveal that they have not covered personality development in a deeper context than how it pertains to the employee professionally. This is because they have only dealt with the external part of personality development, I like to call, ‘The Façade’. The most important aspect of personality development is the effect it has on our body and our mind. The personality will often feel most aware and comfortable with itself when these two things come into harmony with each other. There are so many books today that delve deep into how to achieve success and happiness, but the question is; who is reading them? These books are filled to the brim with quotes and stories about positive thinking and examples of real people who overcame adversity and found differing lessons and levels of success and accomplishment along the way. The problem is… Not many people will go home from a development seminar and actually continue the journey on their own. Not many of us actually sit around and read self help books and personal development articles in our spare time. Thinking that your thought processes are positive will not make you thought processes positive. You will need to act on your thinking. Develop your development skills. You have to fine tune your mind and then start to practice with it. Your mind is a tool and it is up to you to learn to properly use it and then put it into practice. You need to develop a strong foundation, both mentally and physically, for you to see greater rewards from personality development.

The first move in personality development is to admit that you have to improve your personality. Similarly to Yoga I like to think about the mind and body in five layers. The first layer is the physical conscious layer, this is the layer that is related to the things that we do with our physical body like walking and talking. The second layer is the physical subconscious layer which deals with the physical activities that we do in our subconscious like digestion and breathing. The third layer is the emotional intellect layer which is related to our thoughts, thought processes, and parts of our conscious emotional management system.

There is also the ethical/moral layer which is the layer that helps us decide what is right and what is wrong. The last layer is the subconscious emotion layer. This is the layer that relates to our joy and happiness and also our sense of sadness and despair. You will realize that all these layers affect our personality in one way or the other. Moreover it is important to constantly strive to balance these layers of your personality with effective self management techniques to avoid allowing them to negatively define you.