Personal Development Notes

Personal Development

  • The process of improving oneself.
  • Involves self-awareness that includes thoughts, feelings, and behavior.

Knowing Oneself

  • "Knowing oneself is the beginning of wisdom." - Aristotle

Activity 1: Knowing One Self

  • Essential Question:
    1. Who am I?
    2. What three words describe yourself and why?

Dimensions of the Self

  • Physical: Revolves around the physical body of a human being, its processes, functions, and mechanisms.
  • Psychological: Contains the concepts of stress, cognition, behavior, attitude, emotion, and personality.
  • Spiritual: Relating to a superior being.

Attitude

  • A settled way of thinking and feeling about someone or something, typically reflected in a person's behavior.
  • Manifested through behavior and as a representative of personality.

Components of Attitude

  • Affect: A psychological term for emotions, directed to self, environment, and others.
  • Cognition: The way we think and encompasses our thoughts in different levels ranging from ourselves to our environment, from imaginary to perceivable reality.
  • Behavior: The action form or manifestation of attitude; without affect and cognition, behavior will be rendered baseless and ungrounded.

Attitudes Formation

  • Social Factors: Roles in a social environment and social norms. Influence from parents, elders, and peers.
  • Learning: Operant conditioning (B.F. Skinner) - a matter of consequences. To maximize good and minimize bad deeds.
    • Punishment:
    • Positive: Removing pleasant
    • Negative: Giving unpleasant
    • Reinforcement:
    • Positive: Giving pleasant
    • Negative: Removing unpleasant
  • Modelling: Imitating someone close or someone admired.

Self-Concept

  • Our cognition to ourselves, what we think and know about our identity, personality, and individuality.
  • “I think, therefore I am.” - Rene Descartes

Self-Esteem

  • Focused on our attitude towards ourselves; how we value ourselves.