Personal development is another way of saying that you make improvements in your life to access more of your potential. Most of the time when personal development is discussed, it is framed within the actions, plans and goals you set for yourself - and how to achieve them. We often think that by accomplishing goals we have value; we are successful. But, this approach is very focused on external validation. 

In order to achieve true personal development, the focus must first be on self-love and the habits and skills needed to truly love yourself. Developing the self requires you to spend time with yourself – a process that many people shy away from. It is much easier to spend your time and energy helping someone else succeed than it is to take the time to deal with your inner worries, wounds, and past trauma.

Why Self-Love is the cornerstone to Personal Development

Self-love is is the key to unlocking all your manifestation abilities including healing from the past and being able to recognize and receive the abundance that is waiting for you.

We are each our own healers, but sometimes that can be hard to believe and accept. When was the last time you looked yourself in the mirror and spoke words of love and gratitude?

Even this small act can be a challenge.

Yet personal development is about not only getting to know yourself better, but loving who you are. Because when you do, you can make choices for YOU and not based on what someone else thinks you should do.

In order know discern what is the best choice for yourself you need to know yourself, which brings us to 5 Keys to Personal Development. 

The Elements, an Effective Framework for Self Development

The Elements are a long-standing system of connecting humans with nature designed to bring balance to the inner self, as well as the world around you. Within this system it becomes easier to make connections on many levels, to appreciate the universal and to move beyond the fears of the ego. 

1. The Element of Earth is the most solid and grounded of the elements. Earth focuses on physical aspects such as the physical body, as well as what it takes to make money and provide shelter for yourself and loved ones, but it also addresses patterns of behaviour, boundaries, and long-standing programs running in your life. Earth connects us to the concept of seasons, life death and rebirth, and knowing that there is an underlying structure at play. 

Since you were a child, you absorbed certain ways of thinking and being that reflected the culture of your home, your school, your town and so on. These patterns of conditioning have become so ingrained that you no longer consider them on a conscious level. Many of these programs might have been designed to keep you safe, productive, and on course to being a good person. However; some programs can cause issues later in life. For example, if you were often told that, ‘money doesn’t grow on trees,’ as a child, or that, ‘you have to work hard to get paid well.’ Then later in life you might find yourself struggling to make money easily, because on some level you believe it is hard to make money.  

If you find that you are trying to achieve or manifest something in your life and no matter how hard you try, you cannot seem to accomplish the dream, then there might be a program running deep within the subconscious that is blocking you. If this is the case, then Shadow Work can be very effective. 

Shadow Work is using journaling, meditating or even speaking with a trusted person about things that happened in the past and how the experience is affecting you negatively now. Diving in deep allows you uncover the unconscious habits and patterns. When they are brought to the surface your can then work to change the programs to something more healthy for who you ‘d like to be now. For example, ‘money doesn’t grow on trees’ can change into ‘I earn money easily.’

2. The Element of Air, focuses on your mindset. Journaling and affirmations are wonderful support techniques, but they are not the real work of self-development. The real work, the inner work, is about changing your mindset. In order to that you must have an idea where you’d like to move toward, have a direction and vision for yourself. It is easy to focus on what is not working, but developing yourself requires you to focus more of your mental energy and potential on manifesting what you desire. After all, where attention goes, energy flows.

A thousand times a day your mind runs stories about you - about your worth and value, about how you show up or don’t show up. When left unsupervised, your mind will simply talk trash to you. Over time, you will most likely end up believing these falsehoods to the detriment of your self confidence and self esteem. The key here is to create some Sacred Space in your mind. Remember that you are energetic being having a physical experience and connect with the higher aspects of yourself.

3. The Element of Water, focuses on the emotions. So much of how we interpret our experience with life is dependent on how we feel about it. The stories of our lives are contained within our emotions and those are held within the organs and tissues of the body.  

Many people have a tendency to ignore their emotions because, let’s be honest, emotions are intense and messy and take up a lot of time to unpack. They can also be scary, especially if the voice in your head is full of fear. Perhaps because many of us aren’t directly taught the skills of emotional intelligence, we shy away and let the critic dictate our fears and the responses that come with them.  Before you know it, you are talking yourself out of all sorts of potentially amazing experiences and feeling like you don’t deserve better.

 Knowing your values can help you process emotions and get clear on how you’d like to feel in your everyday experiences. Then you can work to create healthy boundaries.

4. The Element of Fire, your connection to your values, your passion, will and drive. The Element of Fire will support you in connecting to your overarching WHY – the reasoning behind why personal development is so necessary for YOU, why struggle through the initial pain to get to a better place, why fight to know yourself more and heal from past trauma, and why defend yourself in the future from those who might attempt to take advantage of you. 

It is nearly impossible for anyone to achieve anything without a goal, a driving force. Whether you desire to quit smoking, lose weight, get a job, or whatever your dream might be, anchoring that desire to yourself with bring more meaning and motivation on the days when you feel like you just might not have the energy. 

5. Commit and enjoy the ride.  So often personal development seems hard. Like eating vegetables, you know you should want to do it for your health, but you just don’t like them. This is a mindset and a story that might just be keeping you from the best thing in your life – the real you! 

When you approach personal development and inner work with curiosity and surrender to the process miracles can happen in your life.  Not only will you improve your relationship with yourself, you just might end up loving yourself more than before.