1
Kelley Lovelace
Identifying Developmental Needs
Interpersonal Relations for Helping Professions
July 5, 2018
Each of us live our lives based off our experiences and personal interpretations of them. Even when we live through the same experience, we don’t interpret it the same and therefore walk away with different perspectives on what happened. Self-awareness is not a skill that we are born with. It is something that we all must learn as we grow and develop throughout our lifetimes. Some of us are fortunate enough to have guidance early in life that helps us develop this skill early. Others are not so lucky and must put in extra effort and work hard at learning this on are own.
I believe that life is a learning experience and being able to recognize our own strengths and weaknesses can help us become better individuals and the best versions of ourselves. With this, we can become and do anything we choose to do, whether it is positive abilities that can help achieve our goals or negative personal areas that need improvement.
We are constantly learning every day and each experience is an opportunity for learning and growth. We all have strengths and things that we are good at. Some we recognize and others we do not. At the same time, we all have areas of our personalities and characters that we could or would like to improve on. At times, it can take a little self-reflection to learn to acknowledge these areas for growth.
For me, I have pinpointed three specific areas that I feel I should focus on for my personal development needs:
1. I catch myself struggling with my reacting behaviors to negative events, and ways of speaking.
2. I catch myself struggling with being a perfectionist.
3. I struggle with engaging in negative gossip at work.
For the first development need, reacting behaviors, this causes me a lot of grief and frustration when I am communicating with co-workers and loved ones. They don’t know what my thought process is, so they can only react to the behaviors they are seeing from me and they likely don’t understand them. For the second development need, my perfectionism, this causes me to second guess myself quite often. I have come to realize how second-guessing myself all the time has led to a drop in my self-confidence. The third personal development need is to address my engaging in negative gossip at work.
My action plan will specifically address each of these development needs that I have by teaching myself to acknowledge when they are happening and redirect my own behavior when it occurs. For the first development need I have set the goal of becoming aware of the situation when it’s happening, choosing my words wisely in these situations, learning to be less defensive, and taking my time to think through and choose how I am going to respond to the situation instead of reacting to it.
The goal that I have set for my second development need is to have faith in myself, increase my self-esteem by acknowledging all the good that I do and am capable of, and letting go of my need to be in control. My final goal for my action plan will be to focus on being a good role model for others to follow. I will teach myself to walk away from the negative gossip and not engage. I will walk away or be assertive and change the subject when the gossip starts so that I cannot be swept up in the hype.
To accomplish these goals, I will need to be able to hold myself accountable. This means that I will need to be able to keep track of my progress and review things that I have been successful on and other areas where I may need to put more focus. I will keep a journal each day or every few days as time permits. I will write down reflections on my days and interactions and then analyze how I did with my goals based on these notes. I will allow myself time for growth and development and not be too hard on myself if I find that I am not meeting these goals as quickly as I plan.
