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Personal and Professional Development - LESSON 1

This document discusses personal and professional development. It explains that self-knowledge is important for self-improvement and that people have both an actual self, based on their self-image, and an ideal self that they aspire to. Personal effectiveness depends on innate talents and skills that can be identified and developed through experience. Key skills that increase personal effectiveness include determination, self-confidence, persistence, stress management, problem-solving, creativity, and generating ideas. The document provides an activity where the reader lists personal strengths, achievements, goals and qualities to gain self-knowledge.

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Jamaica Dumas
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1K views2 pages

Personal and Professional Development - LESSON 1

This document discusses personal and professional development. It explains that self-knowledge is important for self-improvement and that people have both an actual self, based on their self-image, and an ideal self that they aspire to. Personal effectiveness depends on innate talents and skills that can be identified and developed through experience. Key skills that increase personal effectiveness include determination, self-confidence, persistence, stress management, problem-solving, creativity, and generating ideas. The document provides an activity where the reader lists personal strengths, achievements, goals and qualities to gain self-knowledge.

Uploaded by

Jamaica Dumas
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Personal and Professional Development

LESSON 1: Knowing One Self

“Self -knowledge is the beginning of self- improvement” – Baltasar Gracian

1. Why is it important to know yourself?

2. How do you see yourself?

3. How do people brand you?

Ideal self is the self that you aspire to be. It is the one that you hope will possess characteristics similar to that of a
mentor or some other worldly figure. Your actual self, however, is the one that you actually see. It is the self that has
characteristics that you were nurtured or, in some cases, born to have.

The actual self and the ideal self are two broad categories of self-concept . Self-concept refers to your awareness of
yourself. It is the construct that negotiates these two selves. In other words, it connotes first the identification of the
ideal self as separate from others, and second, it encompasses all the behaviors evaluated in the actual self that you
engage in to reach the ideal self.

The actual self is built on self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is derived from social interactions that provide insight into
how others react to you. The actual self is who we actually are. It is how we think, how we feel, look, and act. The
actual self can be seen by others, but because we have no way of truly knowing how others view us, the actual self is
our self-image.

PERSONAL EFFECTIVENESS

It means making use of all the personal resources – talents, skills, energy and time to enable you to achieve your life
goals.

Your knowledge of yourself and how you manage yourself impacts directly on your personal effectiveness. Being
self-aware, making the most of your strengths, learning new skills and techniques and behavioral flexibility are all
keys to improving your personal performance.

Our personal effectiveness depends on our innate characteristics – talent and experience accumulated in the
process of personal development. Talents first are needed to be identified and then developed to be used in a
particular subject area (science, literature, sports, politics, etc.).

Skills also determine whether real actions are performed in accordance with the plan. If the same ability is used many
times in the same situation, then it becomes a habit that runs automatically, subconsciously. Here are some skills
that will greatly increase the efficiency of any person who owns them:

1. Determination - It allows you to focus only on achieving a specific goal without being distracted by less important
things or spontaneous desires. It may be developed with the help of self-discipline exercise.

2. Self-confidence - It appears in the process of personal development, as a result of getting aware of yourself, your
actions and their consequences. Self-confidence is manifested in speech, appearance, dressing, gait, and physical
condition. To develop it, you need to learn yourself and your capabilities, gain positive attitude and believe that by
performing right actions and achieving right goals you will certainly reach success.

3. Persistence - It makes you keep moving forward regardless of emerging obstacles – problems, laziness, bad
emotional state, etc. It reduces the costs of overcoming obstacles. It can also be developed with the help of self-
discipline exercise.

4. Managing stress - It helps combat stress that arises in daily life from the environment and other people. Stress
arises from the uncertainty in an unknown situation when a lack of information creates the risk of negative
consequences of your actions. It increases efficiency in the actively changing environment.
5. Problem-solving skills - They help cope with the problems encountered with a lack of experience. It increases
efficiency by adopting new ways of achieving goals when obtaining a new experience.

6. Creativity - It allows you to find extraordinary ways to carry out a specific action that no one has tried to use. It can
lead to a decrease or an increase of costs, but usually the speed of action is greatly increased when using creative
tools.

7. Generating ideas - It helps you achieve goals using new, original, unconventional ideas. Idea is a mental image of
an object formed by the human mind, which can be changed before being implemented in the real world. For
generating ideas you can use a method of mental maps, which allows you to materialize, visualize and scrutinize all
your ideas, which in turn contributes to the emergence of new ideas. These are just some, but the most important
personal effectiveness skills which make the achievement of any goal easier and less costly.

ACTIVITY: MY BANNER – THE TREASURE WITHIN ME

In the spaces indicated by numbers, write down the following

1 and 2 two things I do very well

3 and 4 my two greatest achievements in life

5 what in myself am I proudest of

6 my happiest moment

7 positive words that my friends use to describe me

8 a personal goal that I have already achieved

9 three blessings for which I am most thankful to God

10 three of my positive qualities

11 difficulties, challenges and problems that I was able to solve and overcome

Prepared by: JAMAICA L. DUMAS

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