Personal Capacities & Personal Growth

Personal growth ultimately means being able to use your personal capacities to their utmost. In order to be the most fulfilled, people also need to feel connected to others. Morality, understanding right and wrong, appropriate concepts of the self in relation to others are very important to people's ability to function socially and achieve their full potential in life.

Personal Capacities

• Capacities are things that people are capable of doing or being. Personal capacities, on the other hand, are personal traits like empathy or perseverance that can be developed through life experience and introspection. Positive psychology, an area of psychology, focuses on helping people reach their full personal potential.

Personal Growth

• Personal growth involves understanding your strengths and weaknesses. Strengths don't have to be completely developed. A person who tends to procrastinate a lot, for instance, isn't necessarily strong in the area of working under pressure. Since it is stressful to procrastinate and therefore bad for the person, from a psychological and physiological point of view, it might actually be a weakness in terms of avoiding work or wanting to reward oneself before finishing the work. The dormant strength in this case could be a flexible attitude. The capacity for flexibility can be developed into a complete strength by learning time-management skills, for instance.

Moral Development

• Moral development is a part of personal growth and is important to the social and emotional functioning of an individual. People have the capacity to develop their moral skills and reach higher levels of functioning. According to early psychology theorist Lawrence Kohlberg, they can move beyond helping other people in their own self-interest to considering everyone's interests and understanding the subjectivity of fairness.

  They can then understand their social roles and branch further out to using society's laws and regulations as their moral compass. According to early psychology theorist Lawrence Kohlberg, the final stage of moral development is understanding the principles of morality and, finally, the inherent rights of human beings that shape the laws and the abstract moral reasoning that cuts across situations and cultures.

Self-Actualization

• Humanistic psychologists pioneered moral development. Humanistic psychologists believe people are born with varying levels of potential and strive to become their best selves. To become self-actualized, in the psychological sense, means that the way would ideally live your life and they way you live your life have been united. You have become the fullest person that you can be or the person you were "meant" to become.

Barriers to Personal Growth

• The term "self-actualization" comes from humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, who thought human beings are driven to grow personally and are hindered from growing by situational factors. According to Maslow, people need certain things in order to be able to grow personally. People need food, shelter, the ability to feel safe, loved and appreciated and a healthy sense of self-esteem. In Maslow's belief, without these things, self-actualization is nearly impossible.