Happiness and Personal development is the most important part we want for those we love, including ourselves. We always want to be happily developed and have those around us be happy in whatever endeavour we take on. We need it in our lives for many more reasons than just feeling good occasionally.
This is a lifelong process. It is a way for people to assess their skills and qualities, consider their aims in life and set goals to realize and maximize their potential.
There is increasing evidence from psychology and neuroscience to suggest that periods of happiness are linked to personal growth, health and development. When we are happy it seems we are more likely to be receptive to outside stimuli than when we are sad or distressed. Happiness also makes us more disposed to engage in a creative endeavour, which is itself another source of fulfilment.
Positive psychologists argue that rather than being fixed, happiness, optimism and other positive traits can be learnt. We offer evidence from our own professional experience in teaching to corroborate these claims and to extend the debate about the relevance of affective neuroscience to education. Researchers has given intense dedication to find out correlation between happiness and personal development.
What is your idea of happiness and personal development?
Happiness is an emotional state characterized by feelings of joy, satisfaction, contentment, and fulfillment. While happiness has many different definitions, it is often described as involving positive emotions and life satisfaction.
Because happiness tends to be such a broadly defined term, psychologists and other social scientists typically use the term ‘subjective well-being’ when they talk about this emotional state. Just as it sounds, subjective well-being tends to focus on an individual’s overall personal feelings about their life in the present.
Two key components of happiness are:
The balance of emotions: Everyone experiences both positive and negative emotions, feelings, and moods. Happiness is generally linked to experiencing more positive feelings than negative ones.
Life satisfaction: This relates to how satisfied you feel with different areas of your life including your relationships, work, achievements, and other things that you consider important.
Personal development allows you to be proactive and take charge of your actions. You may not always reach your objective but you lead a more fulfilling life because your purpose is defined. Personal development contributes to both satisfaction and success in life.
You can work on your personal development by embracing certain self-improvement skills. These are traits and qualities that you already have or gain through education and training. Some common personal development skills are:
- Good communication allows you to convey your thoughts with clarity and confidence
- Interpersonal skills that help you build relationships and make an impression on others in social situations
- Problem-solving skills that enable you to find the best solutions when you encounter obstacles
- Adaptability skills that let you adjust to new things quickly and easily in addition to staying calm during unanticipated situations
- Leadership skills that help you guide others; boost morale and builds confidence
People figure out definition of happiness and personal development on the basis of their perception.
What is the importance of happiness and personal development?
Importance of happiness
Research shows that happiness leads to a wide range of benefits for our performance, health, relationships and more. So, rather than success being the key to happiness, research shows that happiness could be the key to success. Indeed, happiness also brings substantial benefits for society as a whole.
For example, a review of more than 160 studies found “clear and compelling evidence” that happier people have better overall health and live longer than their less happy peers.
The sad truth is that in recent decades we have become substantially richer but no happier. We have reached the point where mental ill-health is one of our greatest social challenges – causing more of suffering in our society than either unemployment or poverty. This is why increasing numbers of policymakers and leaders are now calling for measures of progress to be based on happiness and personal development not just economic factors such as growth in GDP.
So happiness does matter – the scientific evidence is compelling. The pursuit of happiness is not some fluffy nice-to-have or middle-class luxury; it’s about helping people to live better lives and creating a society that is more productive, healthy and cohesive.
Importance of personal development
There’s a common misconception that personal development is reserved for those who need to work harder to achieve their goals. In reality, even the most successful people constantly strive for improvement. Your brain needs new information so that you can continue to flourish. Learning is a continuous process and doesn’t stop unless you want to.
Personal development may be time-consuming but there are many advantages to this process.
Provides Clarity To Personal Vision: Personal development helps you define your personal vision and life goals more clearly. When you establish targets for yourself, it becomes easier to create a plan and work towards those objectives.
Improves Existing Skills: Learning and personal growth are the hallmarks of personal development. You learn from your past mistakes and overcome challenges through education, training and guidance.
Helps Identify True Potential: The more you work on your skills and abilities, the more you discover your hidden potential. You learn to push your boundaries and explore new things because you know how to best utilize your knowledge.
Drives Motivation And Satisfaction: Personal development is empowering as it lets you take control of things. Since there is constant improvement, you feel more confident and motivated. Your productivity increases and your performance gives you satisfaction.
Helps Focus On The Bigger Picture: When you acknowledge your shortcomings, you hold yourself accountable for your mistakes. This level of self-awareness helps you look at the bigger picture and not beat yourself up about things that are beyond your control.
How personal development affect your life?
Personal development will allow you to learn about yourself and what you want from life. When you’ve invested in personal development, you will want to keep going. Personal development in itself will change the way you live your life – you will always be starving to be better. It will allow you to flourish and live in the moment.
It will give you the feeling of wellbeing and happiness and will help you to succeed and reach your full potential.
If you feel like personal development is too challenging, try to understand that you’ve already been doing it. Since the day you were born, you’ve been developing and improving skills and talents. Now is simply the time to make the process more conscious and devote energy toward the things you hope you improve.
how do you measure happiness?
“You can’t measure happiness.” I hear this a lot. What is interesting to me is that professors, researchers, and the general public never doubt that you can measure depression, anxiety, and stress. But many are reluctant to accept that happiness is measurable.
Researchers have attempted to measure happiness with five approaches:
- Biological: Researchers have had only minimal success in identifying the biological markers of happiness. What we do know is that the markers for happiness aren’t the same as for depression. For example, if low levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin predict depression, high levels of serotonin don’t predict happiness. This is important. It suggests that happiness and depression are not opposite ends of a single continuum, but are better thought of as related, but independent, dimensions.
- Behavioural: Researchers have used behaviours to estimate happiness. Behaviours such as the frequency of smiling, laughing, and helping others have been examined. When the use of emojis is studied, the results suggest that Hawaii is the happiest state, and Louisiana the least happy. When hundreds of tweets are analyzed, researchers find that Mondays are linked to low levels of happiness, and daylight saving time results in a happiness boost.
- Unspoken Measures: Disguised measures, in which people don’t even know that their happiness is being assessed, have been developed. These have been successfully used to assess racism. Unspoken measures typically assess reaction times in connecting positive and negative terms to oneself and others. However, unspoken measures haven’t proved to be effective in assessing happiness.
- Other Analysis: Asking others to rate a person’s happiness has been useful. For example, for young children, we ask their parents and teachers to rate their children’s happiness.
- Self-Analysis: By far the most common way that researchers assess happiness is through self-analysis. Using multiple-item scales or a single question, we simply ask people about their level of happiness. People think about their happiness, and it is a subjective state, so it makes sense to ask them about it.
how do you measure personal development?
Many of us, while we pursue personal development, we don’t always take measures to measure personal development. It can be hard to gauge where we’re at.
- Self-awareness: In order to measure your personal growth, it’s important first to gain and practise self-awareness.
Self-awareness keeps you grounded in reality and present at the moment. Self-awareness doesn’t let you sugarcoat nor understate truth and facts with false or inaccurate pretences about yourself and your abilities.
Having self-awareness means being real and honest with yourself.
It’s nearly impossible to know where you’re at and measure your progress without having self-consciousness and awareness.
- Changing trends: You can be better today than you were a year ago, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be better a year from now. I don’t think looking back to your past, in general, to see how far you’ve come is the best way to measure your personal growth now. It’s good to look at your past personal growth, but it can be outdated.
It’s important to see how things are going currently and in the near past. You may be better now than you were a year ago, but you may have also been doing better two months ago than now.
- Clarity of goals: Besides looking at trends, it’s difficult to know if you’re going in the right direction if you don’t know where you’re headed or if it’s too vague.
This is why it’s important to gain clarity of goals. If you’re having trouble setting goals and you’re feeling stuck, this article may help.
- Track your progress: One of the best ways to measure your personal development is to implement measures to track it.
There are many different ways you can track your personal development, goals, and habits.
How to track:
- Journaling: Journaling is great for tracking things like success, failures, goals, thoughts, emotions, self-esteem.
- Apps & habit trackers: If you like to use the app HabitBull on your Phone to track your habits.
- Schedules & planners: If you like to use schedules and planners to track pretty much everything. If you like having it on the wall in front of you (or on your desktop), so you can easily see and assess everything. That way you can see how my month is going and my weeks as well.
They’re great for tracking habits after the day is over as well as setting deadlines and planning goals.
Relation between happiness and personal development
It is not uncommon for individuals to feel that they have grown through difficult life circumstances. Looking back upon earlier versions of ourselves we often feel that we have grown, improved, or become “better people” through life experience.
The experience of personal development is certainly incorporated into naïve notions of development as well as psychological approaches to well-being. Indeed, the feeling that one is growing is associated with wellbeing.
However, the extent to which this phenomenological experience of having grown reflects real developmental change remains a question open to empirical inquiry. When personality psychologists discuss personality development they are often talking about either change in traits over time or changes in the wisdom or complexity that are presumably unavailable to straightforward self-report.
Personal development is not a simple process, not just a straight line leading from A to B. It is what kind of human being we become – how we see ourselves and what we bring into the world. And we change constantly – whether it is our style, our surroundings, our character or our community. But why? Because we need to? Who is the judge of that?
The truth is that we make changes in our lives because we are simply searching for happiness. That is what everybody wants, isn’t it? This is our lives purpose. We want to grow into something new, we want to break free from the way we live currently. Because deep down we feel that this change might bring us one step closer to our true happiness. It can be left to find a better environment to start your career or making friends with other people because you want to escape the community you are currently in.
But how exactly do you develop? Is there a certain point in your life where you know you have done everything? As a said, this process is more than just change. In the end, we want to please ourselves, be happy that we became the person we are and we have the life we lead. That is what we are searching for – enjoyment, sense of achievement, peace of mind. Is that easy to accomplish?
No. There will always be doubt, questions about whether you are making the right choices or not. And escaping from your comfort zone into something unknown is difficult and frightening. But we have to ask ourselves whether we want it, what will that change bring into our lives. And what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger. Each rough patch makes us tougher, wiser and braver. After that, obstacles become easier to handle.
Growth is oftentimes uncomfortable, messy and unexpected, but it is necessary. It brings us to a better version of ourselves. But more importantly, it brings us to peace, comfort and development. Yes, change is scary. But it also opens new doors for us and creates the path that will lead us to true happiness.
