Why the Emphasis on Personal Development

You may have noticed quite a few posts lately about personal development. Yes some of that is because it’s the time of the year where a lot of folks are setting goals that are supposed to help them be happier, more fit, more financially sound, more something. Yes, some of it is because I’m focused on developing products and services that will help people with their own personal development. But my reasons go way deeper than that.

Personal Development Impacts All Aspects of Our Life

The biggest reason we need to take charge of our own personal development is how big of an impact in has in our lives. I can’t think of too many other things that have the potential to completely transform all aspects of our lives. When I think about personal development I’m thinking about life skills, technical skills, behavior traits, personality awareness, values, motivations, priorities, and so much more. The idea of personal development crosses over professional, familial, spiritual, and social lines. I do feel that I’m over exaggerating when I say that your personal development will touch more aspects of your life than anything else.

Think about the impact of understanding your personal communication styles and preferences can be in all of those aspects of your life. What about understanding what drains or replenishes your energy? Or think about how much ensuring you align your professional goals with your core values would help you not back yourself into a professional corner.

Compare that to the idea of just taking the next high paying job that comes along regardless if it aligns with your other goals and values. Or think about spending a whole bunch of time and energy becoming an expert in excel in order to meet the needs of your current team only to realize you really don’t like numbers all that much and would prefer to be doing something creative. Those may seem like simple examples, but I see it happening all the time.

Getting Our Foundation Set First

The second reason I have been so focused on personal development is my experience that until our personal foundation is set in order, everything else is going to be less than it could be or at the very least, be on shaky ground.

It’s like the difference between building the foundation on sand vs. granite. When pioneers first settled the Salt Lake Valley, they laid a sandstone foundation for a Temple. They had to bury it at one point and when they uncovered it, they discovered that the sandstone had already started to crack. They went through the laborious process of replacing it with granite. That foundation stood firm for almost 170 years before they undertook the process of using modern technology and best practices to put in a new foundation designed to last hundreds of years.

This is a great example of how important it is to first, build the right foundation to start with and second, to adapt that foundation as new information comes to light. We can follow that same path with our own lives by ensuring that our goals, plans, professional lives, etc. are all built on the foundation that is right for us.

Once we have a solid foundation in place, or at least the start of one, then we have a much better chance of starting to build up and branch out beyond that foundation and doing so successfully.

The other side of this idea, is that if my own foundation is shaky, how can I hope to help others. Doesn’t matter if it’s our kids, spouse, extended family, friends, community, professional associates, or anyone else. If we truly want to be able to lift others, we have to do so from a place of strength and firm ground. Otherwise, we all may come tumbling down.

Abdication of Responsibility and Outcomes

A side effect of not taking ownership of our development is that we take more of "I’ll just roll with whatever comes" approach and because we aren’t taking charge, we too easily abdicate our path, progress, and/or happiness to someone or something else.

What do I mean by abdication? I see this happen when people look to a parent, spouse, manager, ecclesiastical leader, celebrity, and most often, social media - to tell us who we should be, what we should be working on, or what we should have in our lives that we currently don’t. Essentially we want someone or something else to give us the shortcut to our happiness.

Over the last several months I have seen a flood of ads telling me how those in my age bracket can get in shape. The biggest thing I have seen is that walking is hard on the knees and that the gym is for young people. I have no idea if any of those things are true, but I use this as an example to point out just how generic this advice is. If you have bad knees, walking could very well be bad for them. Yes, the gym is definitely for young people, but isn’t it also for people of all ages?

If I am just going with the latest thing on social media, then apparently I’m going to stop walking and doing anything in the gym and follow their routines. None of this takes into account my personal circumstances like how in shape I may or may not be already, what types of activities I enjoy most (like mountain biking or swimming), how much time I have to work out, what other resources I have at my disposal, etc.

What might be a better approach? Putting in the time and effort to figure out what actually works for me. That might mean spending some time doing research, consulting a personal trainer, trying some different types of exercise, and then putting together my own personal plan.

So reason number one to not abdicate your own development to anyone else, is that you are likely to get a generic plan that works some of the time for some of the people and odds are you will not fall into either of those categories.

The second reason to not abdicate your development to anyone else is because if you abdicate the planning, it becomes too easy to abdicate putting in the work and then ultimately abdicate responsibility for the outcome. Let’s stick with my workout analogy: if I let someone else tell me what will work best for me, especially some random commercial on social media, then when I don’t quite get out of bed on time it’s easier to say, I’m not going to do that today. And when after 2 microseconds, I don’t see vast improvement, I can just say “this is stupid” and walk away. There is no buy in and no incentive to keep at it to make it work or try and course correct it.

On the flip side, if I have put in the work, built MY plan, then I’m more likely to put in the effort that will eventually lead to progress.

Ultimately I just can’t advocate putting our personal progress, success, and potential 100% in the hands of another person. That doesn’t mean we don’t find mentors or experts, ask questions, incorporate best practices from wherever we can find them, etc. But it does mean that if you take some random questionnaire on social media that you just follow along blindly. You need to be able to take that information, digest it, compare it to what you know about yourself, check for alignment with your personal goals, and then decide what to do with it. That is not at all passive. Remember that Harry Potter could have been great in Slytherin, but ultimately he chose to be great in Gryffindor.

Why We Tend Not to Be Deliberate

It’s hard. That’s the simple way of stating this. It is absolutely the path of most resistance and the road less traveled. It requires putting in time and effort, being willing to be uncomfortably honest with ourselves and others, being open to constant change and course correction, and being willing to commit to the long journey and not just look for the immediate gratification we are so trained to look for.

Combine that with the facts that we have a ton of competing priorities, our life is filled with distractions that seem way more appealing than those things that will make a much bigger difference, we have others that are constantly in need of our attention, we have been conditioned to believe that it is selfish to focus on us, we don’t have confidence that we can successfully manage our own development (after all there are so many others that know so much more than me), and probably a thousand other reasons you have thought of while reading this.

Breaking the Pattern

The way to break this pattern is much simpler than you might expect. I’m not going to say it’s easier. There really is nothing easy about taking charge of our own direction in life and being very deliberate about it. But at the same time, it’s not something that requires hundreds of steps, thousands of hours, or more cash than you have on hand. Are you ready for the secret steps?

1 - Understand who you are (personality style, values, motivations, priorities)

2 - Now that you know who you are, identify who you want to become

3 - Identify goals that align with who you are, who you want to become and those keys you identified in step 1.

4 - Break down your goals and identify the first simple steps you can take to start making progress towards those goals.

5 - Rinse and repeat.

Maybe that sounds too simple and you might think you have already done that with varying degrees of success, but my guess would be that most reading this blog have not really sat down and gone through an exercise like this, let alone do they do it on a regular basis. This is how it usually goes:

1 - I know who I am and what drives me (I’m a hard worker that likes to continue to progress financially).

2 - I just want that next promotion or that next raise or to win the lottery.

3 - My goals are whatever my manager or family needs me to do this next year.

4 - My first step is to just get out of bed and do what needs to be done.

5 - Tomorrow will be much of the same.

I don’t know about you, but that seems kind of crazy to me that we would settle for just see what needs to be done today and doing that. We all have so much more potential than that. The idea of just saying I’ll take whatever crumbs life chooses to throw my way is something we should immediately chase from our minds.

Summary

If you have read this and have thought to yourself, I’d really like to see how much more there is for me to capture in life or you’ve been trying to figure out how to take charge of your personal development, then give those five simple steps above a try. And if you want to dive even deeper into this, I’d love to have you join my Personal Development Foundations course and community as an early adopter. There you will find more tools, resources, support and ideas to help you step up and supercharge your development in 2026.

Click Here for more details.