Throughout their lives, all people go through various levels of personal development. Some are only able to wade through a few of them and then pause, and stay in place for the rest of their days, while others keep going through the stages.
Personal Development - the key role of our perspective of thinking
The latter is constantly open to receiving new information and broadening their perspective. Because, in essence, personal development is broadening the perspective.
Widening the Perspective in Personal Development
Right after birth, we have a very limited perspective. We are connected to the world. We don't know where we end or where the world begins. Psychologists refer to this impression as "ocean unity." It is, however, a very unconscious type of oneness. If we develop far enough, we go through many stages of "glare" until we finally come back to a sense of oneness with the world. This time, however, this sense of oneness is extremely conscious and is often called enlightenment.
In the course of our development, we remain at a given level until the moment when something pushes us to move one level higher. This transition is also accompanied by a period of integrating experiences that follow with change. Moving from one level to another can be called vertical growth while integrating consecutive experiences into ourselves - horizontal growth.
One of the most important aspects of growth understood in this way is that each stage includes a new opportunity to look at yourself, at other people, and at the whole world - from a broader perspective. This ability to see from a broader perspective is what spiritual teachers refer to as expanded awareness.
We might even be tempted to say that all mental, emotional, and spiritual problems, including problems with common activities in life (such as paying rent, building successful relationships, and finding a satisfying job) - are the result of a lack of proper development, incomplete stages or changes in which we experienced a kind of trauma instead of development.
The great contemporary philosopher and developmental psychologist Ken Wilber is known for saying that spiritual development (essentially any development) is a matter of adopting new perspectives.
Our awareness broadens as we add new perspectives. In fact, they are two different ways of describing the same phenomenon. You could say that as we grow, we see more and more how everything is connected and moves together - we focus more and more on the relationships between people, things, and events and move away from seeing them as separate entities.
In other words, our perspective becomes more holistic.
Just like in the Russian dolls, Wańki Wstańki, each new level exceeds and incorporates the previous one. In the earlier stages, everything is related to me. We are self-centered, narcissistic, and unable to accept other people's perspectives. As we develop, we are able to take our perspective. We perceive the needs and desires of the group but still do not see those outside the group.
Moving on, our perspective becomes even wider and we can look at the world from the position of all of us.
Not everyone manages to exceed the level of self-centeredness. Few exceed the level of the group and come to the perspective of seeing from all of us. And very few exceed this last level.
Just as a child has far fewer opportunities than an adult, lower levels lack the proper perspective to deal effectively with the complexity of life. A person who perceives the world in a very simple black-and-white way is less prepared to face multidimensional situations.
If at any point in our lives we experience traumatic experiences, unresolved mental and emotional problems arise within us: fear, anxiety, anger, and depression settle.
What I call "magical thinking": social immaturity, illogical thinking, problems with setting personal boundaries, and problems with moral judgment ... This makes us seek the help of therapists, and coaches, or start spending money on various types of training and programs in the field of personal development.
When you don't have the right perspective, you won't see something new
When a person reaches a certain stage of development, they immerse themselves completely in it. In his mental, emotional, social, and ethical perspectives as well. We could call it the fish-in-water effect. By being inebriated with these perspectives, you are these patterns. As with fish in water, your current stage of development is your reality and you have no perspective, to see or imagine anything else.
The moment you move to the next level, you start to see what you were not aware of at the previous level. Now, instead of being these ways of thinking, you come to have them. By owning them, you begin to have control over them, while on the previous level, you unconsciously acted under their influence. For example, an emotionally troubled person is immersed in these emotions. Instead of possessing them, he is them. Her emotions seem to be happening to her, automatically and unconsciously.
The same could be said about beliefs, morals, cognitive processes, and several other aspects of life. As long as you are immersed in them, you cannot control them, you cannot judge how they affect your life. Instead, they help you unconsciously build your life, for better or for worse ...
The author of the text is Bill Harris, the late, creator of Centerpointe Research Institute Headers and underlines in text: Empowerment Coaching
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