Personal development

Personal development is a process of individual self-development and the development of others. At the level of individual, personal development includes goals, plans or actions oriented towards one or more of the following aims:

* improving self-awareness

* improving self-knowledge
* building or renewing identity
* developing strengths or talents
* identifying or improving potential
* building employability or human capital
* enhancing lifestyle or the quality of life
* fulfilling aspirations
* defining and executing personal development plans
* improving [social abilities]

The concept covers a wider field than self-development or self-help: personal development also includes developing others. This may take place through roles such as those of a teacher or mentor, either through a personal competency (such as the skill of certain managers in developing the potential of employees) or a professional service (such as providing trainin, assessment or coaching).

Beyond improving oneself and developing others, personal development is a field of practice and research. As a field of practice it includes personal development methods, learning programs, assessment systems, tools and techniques. As a field of research, personal development topics increasingly appear in scientific journals, higher education reviews, management journals and business books.

Any sort of development — whether economic, political, biological, organizational or personal — requires a framework if one wishes to know whether change has actually occurred. In the case of personal development, an individual often functions as the primary judge of improvement, 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, and a feedback system to provide information on changes.

• Self-awareness is the awareness that one exists as an individual being. Without self-awareness the self perceives and accepts the thoughts that are occurring to be who the self is. Self-awareness gives one the option or choice to choose thoughts being thought rather than simply thinking the thoughts that are stimulated from the accumulative events leading up to the circumstances of the moment

• Self-knowledge is a term used in psychology to describe the information that an individual draws upon when finding an answer to the question "what am I like?".

Self-knowledge is a prerequisite of self-consciousness (not to be confused with consciousness as a raw subject) alongside self-awareness. However, self-awareness may in itself be a necessary condition for self-knowledge to be sought after and developed in the first place. Self-awareness alone is not enough for a being to be considered self-conscious; young infants and even animals display elements of simple self-awareness^[1] and agency/contingency^[2]. However it requires a greater level of cognition for a creature to become truly self-conscious. It is the knowledge of one's self and one's properties and the desire to seek such knowledge that guide the development of the self concept. Self-knowledge informs us of our mental representations of ourselves, which contain attributes that we uniquely pair with ourselves, and theories on whether these attributes are stable, or dynamic.
Self-knowledge is a component of the self, or more accurately, the self-concept. The self-concept is thought to have three primary aspects:

• The Cognitive Self
• The Affective Self
• The Executive Self

Self-knowledge is linked to the cognitive self in that its motives guide our search to gain greater clarity and assurance that our own self-concept is an accurate representation of our true self;^{[vague][citation needed]} for this reason the cognitive self is also referred to as the known self. The cognitive self is made up of everything we know (or think we know about ourselves). This implies physiological properties such as hair color, race, and height etc.; and psychological properties like beliefs, values, and dislikes to name but a few.
The affective and executive selves are also known as the felt and active selves respectively, as they refer to the emotional and behavioral components of the self-concept.