What Is Personal Growth? And Why Is It So Important?

Think about yourself from 5 years ago. Were you the same person then as you are now? Have you grown or improved in any ways that you’re proud of? Have you made any changes that have benefited your health or well-being?

Personal growth and personal development have become popular buzzwords in recent years because of its power to help us reach our full potential and live our healthiest, happiest life. But the concept is hardly new. Throughout the centuries, philosophers, theologians, and psychologists have dedicated their work to figuring out how we can become the best version of ourselves. What is personal development? What are 5 important aspects of personal development? Let’s take a look at how personal growth, meaningful change, and self-development are so important.

Defining Personal Growth and Personal Development

Personal growth — or personal development — is the process of developing and improving the skills, knowledge, wisdom, attitudes, behavior, and habits that can increase our overall well-being. Otherwise referred to as self-improvement or personal development, personal growth is a wide-encompassing term that can be applied to various areas of our lives — from our overall health and well-being to our social skills and professional life.

Similarly, given that we are all unique individuals, personal growth often looks different for everyone. For instance, for some it might look like leading a healthier lifestyle by changing their diet and incorporating more exercise. For others, it might look like forging better relationships, getting wise with our finances, or becoming generally more self-aware.

According to American psychologist Abraham Maslow, our basic human needs — such as breathing, eating, and having a social network around us — need to be fulfilled in order to achieve self-actualization, or reach our fullest potential. In other words, we can’t “work” on improving ourselves if we’re struggling to find safety and security.

It’s worth noting that personal growth is not always easy. It often takes a lot of time, patience, and effort to improve ourselves in the ways we want. Similarly, it’s often a lifelong journey of bettering ourselves; we’ll never achieve perfection. But perhaps the most important key to personal growth is wanting to actually improve ourselves in the first place.

5 Important Aspects of Personal Development

As noted above, there are many different types of personal development we can work towards. Here are some:

• Mental personal growth: This can be anything that expands our mental capacity, exercises our brain, or helps us stay mentally fit. For instance, it might involve attending workshops, training sessions, or learning new languages, instruments, or other new skills. As we expand our mental capacity, so does our resiliency, innovation, and self-awareness.
• Social personal growth: This is about improving our social skills and might look like forging better relationships, working on our communication skills, or becoming better listeners so we can connect well with others. For others, it might be about working on the ability to receive and give feedback well.
• Emotional personal growth: Emotional personal growth is about expanding our emotional intelligence — the ability to understand feelings and how those feelings shape the thoughts and behavior of both ourselves and others. It also might involve boosting our confidence and self-esteem, and learning to respond with resilience to challenging circumstances.
• Physical personal growth: This involves boosting our overall health and well-being by doing things that are good for our body, such as eating properly, getting adequate sleep, and exercising. When our physical self is nourished, our mind often benefits as well.
• Spiritual personal growth: This involves connecting to our spiritual self or investing in a deeper understanding of our own self in the world. It also helps us get to know ourselves better, grow in self-awareness, and uncover our true values.

Why Is Personal Development So Important?

Personal development is important if we want to have healthy, loving relationships with ourselves and others. It can also lead to a greater sense of peace, joy, and fulfillment, as it encourages us to continually learn and grow, rather than remain stuck in unhealthy patterns or behaviors. Here are some more specific benefits to personal growth:

• Increased self-awareness and self-esteem: Personal development requires looking inward at our own thoughts, feelings, habits and behaviors in order to make changes. It challenges us to look toward who we want to become and to develop steps to get there. By investing in ourselves, we’re increasing our self-awareness and self-esteem.
• Increased mental fitness: Just as we get in physical shape by going to the gym, we can also increase our mental fitness and toughness through self-improvement. This often requires work, but it’s well worth the effort. People with strong mental fitness are often more productive, creative, and innovative, and they’re less likely to experience mental illness.
• Greater resilience: People who strive for personal growth also tend to develop greater resilience, or the ability to bounce back from setbacks. This is because they’ve learned to overcome challenges, or traits they might not like about themselves, by taking small steps that add up over time.

Starting Your Personal Growth Journey

We can start our self-development journey at any point in our life — it’s never too late! The important thing is to actually want to embark on the journey and make changes that help us become the best possible version of ourselves.

A good place to start is by taking the time to reflect on where we are right now. Some questions we might ask ourselves are:

• What are my strengths? 
• What values are important to me?
• What do I want to start doing?
• What do I want to stop doing?
• In what areas do I want to grow and improve? 
• What kind of person or character traits would I like to have? 

Answering these questions openly and honestly can help us set personal growth goals and develop an actionable plan. For instance, we might realize that we want to stop complaining so much and start to become more grateful. We can practice this by setting a goal of writing down at least 3 things we’re thankful for every day.

Keep in mind that personal growth is highly personalized. In other words, there’s no “one size fits all” approach that works for everyone. What might look like a small personal growth goal for one person might look huge to another — and that’s ok. The important thing is to start taking action.

If you’re looking to improve your health and well-being, Reframe can help. We’ve helped millions of people not only cut back on their alcohol consumption, but work on becoming the healthiest, happiest version of themselves.