Living life is not a field to cross. At a young age, it seems that all doors are open and you just need to make an effort. In maturity, one often comes to the understanding that many things could have turned out differently, that the open doors were illusory, and that efforts were directed in the wrong direction. The reasons for this situation are mistakes in personality development. They are the result of a combination of circumstances. Let's consider what factors influence personality development, what stages a person goes through in the course of his life and with what results he emerges from age-related crises.
Factors influencing personality development
Factors influencing personality development include all the influences that a person experiences in the process of his formation. They are usually divided into internal, that is, a priori characteristic of the individual, and external, that is, environmental conditions.
Internal factors
A child born has a nervous system with congenital characteristics. First of all, these include the speed and ratio of the processes of excitation and inhibition - the most important factors influencing the development of personality. They determine how a person reacts to external stimuli: how quickly he responds and how quickly this reaction, gradually weakening, fades away. Here are two examples:
- In the process of learning, that is, development, one person quickly “grabs” the material, that is, reacts to the stimulus (learning), and slowly “cools down,” getting stuck on it. People with this type of temperament are called melancholics, and they demonstrate good learning ability with minimal exposure.
- Another person learns more slowly and moves on to other topics more quickly. This is a sanguine person, whose learning requires a stronger impact: more emotional, with a large number of repetitions.
If we develop a melancholic and a sanguine person in the same way, as is done in a modern school, then, most likely, the first will be in constant stress, while the second will not fully assimilate. In both cases, personality development will suffer. This is why internal factors are decisive for successful human development.
Environmental conditions and their influence
If internal factors are the basis and matrix, then external factors form the conditions for the realization of the potential they provide. These are the main conditions for personal development:
- Family relationships.
- Availability of goods.
- Financial situation.
- Social environment.
The primary and most important factor for the full development of personality is the family. It is in it that a little person learns patterns of behavior, receives love and protection, and often overprotection. Family relationships influence whether he will feel safe and positively perceive what happens in his future life. Or he will repress and compensate, gradually developing certain mental disorders.
An important condition for personal development is the availability of goods. Benefits mean a wide range of things and phenomena that exist to satisfy needs, including:
- living conditions;
- comfort of the living environment;
- education;
- ways of spending leisure time (sports, cultural events, interest groups, etc.);
- trips.
Most of the listed benefits are purchased for money, so financial situation is the next important factor in personal development.
The social environment has a total influence on the development of a person, starting from neighbors and other children in the yard, ending with established social practices in a particular micro-society.
If a person is surrounded by developed people, then this stimulates his development.
Conversely, a simple environment, as a rule, is associated with the negative influence of the environment, which leads to the development of negative personality traits: lack of commitment, intemperance, a tendency to drunkenness and other deviations.
Harmony of external conditions and personal characteristics as the main factor
Personal development is always a multifactorial process. A child can be raised in a prosperous family, have a variety of educational leisure activities, travel with his parents and learn a lot of new things. However, as he grows up, he falls into “bad company,” which negatively affects his life and development as a person.
Another child, whose starting conditions were significantly more modest, due to his own high motivation, ultimately reaches a high level of development, and his life is more than successful.
Third option: a child may be talented “from birth”, but to realize the talent it is necessary to be in a certain place and at a certain time, and also to make the right choice. If these main external factors do not take place or do not coincide, then the talented personality will not receive further development.
Personal characteristics develop only when a person finds himself in situations with stimulating external conditions.
Diagnosis of mental state
The best diagnostic method is consultation with a psychologist. During the conversation, observing the client’s reactions and analyzing his answers, the specialist identifies the true reason. Ancillary tests are used to confirm the diagnosis. By the way, testing can also be done at home.
However, it is important to remember that the results of one test never make a diagnosis.
Like diagnostic methods, technology for solving psychological problems is selected on an individual basis. In general, to solve the problem, the psychologist builds interaction with the client according to the following algorithm:
- Establishing contact, building trust.
- Client's confession. A detailed story about what worries him, a description of problems and feelings.
- Clarifying dialogue. The psychologist asks questions, clarifies what the client said, gives hints, guides him to solve the problem and helps the person understand himself.
- Solution to the problem. The client himself realizes and finds a way out of the current situation.
Thus, during psychotherapy the client receives the following:
- awareness of true problems, cause-and-effect relationships;
- release of emotions;
- searching for and making an adequate decision;
- accepting what cannot be changed and adapting to it;
- personal growth and the ability to better understand oneself and others.
The specific rehabilitation plan depends on the nature of the situation and the individual characteristics of the client. A psychologist has hundreds of different methods in his arsenal.
Stages and stages of personality development
There are several periodizations of personality development. The most complete and often cited was proposed by the German-born psychologist Erik Erikson. He identified 8 stages of personality development:
- Infancy.
- Early childhood.
- Game age.
- School age.
- Youth.
- Youth.
- Maturity.
- Old age.
According to Erikson, each stage involves a separate internal conflict, which is resolved in one of two possible ways: favorable and unfavorable for the development of the individual.
Infancy
According to Erikson, in infancy the child is in a “trust-distrust” conflict. The extent to which he will perceive the world around him as reliable and predictable largely, but not absolutely entirely, depends on the result with which he emerges from this period. In order for personality development to be successful, at this stage the mother must take care of the baby.
Early childhood
During early childhood (1-3 years), the child masters basic independent skills. The leading conflict is “autonomy versus guardianship.” On the one hand, the child strives to expand the boundaries of his actions, on the other, adults limit his independence. If the first dominates, the child, leaving the stage of early childhood, acquires the rudiment of such a quality of a future personality as will. Overprotection creates lack of will.
Game age
During the age of play, or preschool, the main contradiction becomes “initiative-restriction.” If adults support the child’s games and initiatives, then such useful traits as enterprise and determination are strengthened. If adults constantly pull the child back and act through direct prohibitions, then they create a feeling of guilt in him. This negatively affects the individual, creating preconditions for the development of mental disorders in subsequent periods.
School age
Having become confident in the reliability of the surrounding world, having learned to be autonomous and proactive, the individual enters the period of school age. In it, she must acquire competence, master complex skills, learn to think independently and cooperate with other people. If at this stage the child encounters insurmountable obstacles (poor academic performance, bullying by peers or discrimination by the teacher), this leads to the formation of an inferiority complex.
Youth
Youth, or adolescence, is key in Erikson's periodization. Questions to be resolved by a teenager: who he is and what he wants to strive for. With a positive outcome, the personality acquires such important qualities as integrity and consistency. They are necessary for further development.
If these fundamental questions do not find answers, feelings of uncertainty, uselessness and purposelessness of existence are formed. They complicate the development of personality, at least in the classical understanding of this process.
Youth
Erikson called youth a short age period - 20-25 years. At this stage, the individual improves in building intimate relationships. On the one hand, she wants closeness and support. On the other hand, to maintain independence. At this fork in the road, the individual will acquire the habit of being paired with someone or being alone.
Maturity
The longest period in personality development is maturity (25-65 years). The person is in the most productive state. He improves his skills, passes on knowledge to younger people, raises children, and acquires thoroughness. In adulthood, an understanding of deep themes comes: connections between generations, responsibility for the future, caring for others, charity. Or it doesn’t come - and then they talk about stagnation and indifference, which are a consequence of unresolved issues at previous stages of development.
Old age
The final stage of personality development is the time to reflect on one’s life. As in the previous stages, it is realized in two polar variants: “integrity-hopelessness”. A developed personality in old age wisely accepts his life as it has turned out. In the opposite case, a person is overcome by a feeling of hopelessness and regret for the years spent aimlessly.
Causes of difficulties
Difficulties have psychological, social and physiological prerequisites.
Psychological reasons include:
- unmet needs;
- living against one's nature;
- systematic suppression of feelings, emotions, desires.
In simple words, a person either worries that he is missing something, or suffers from the fact that he cannot get rid of something. One way or another, we are talking about self-suppression. This is what makes the individual unhappy.
Interesting! For most people, the habit of suppressing emotions, feelings and desires appears in childhood, when parents keep repeating: “Don’t scream”, “Don’t cry”, “You’ll get by”, “This is impossible”, “I don’t want a lot of things either, but necessary".
The second group of psychological prerequisites is strong emotional shocks or many minor experiences. For example, the death of someone close is a strong shock. An example of frequent minor shocks is systematic humiliation, insults, and beatings.
Social and psychological reasons include:
- poverty or unstable income, delays in payments, dim prospects;
- unemployment;
- unstable situation in society;
- drastic changes in life (divorce, move, job change, dismissal, wedding, retirement).
In addition, physiological causes of psychological problems can be identified. Prolonged or severe illness, head injuries, tumors, intoxication, hormonal imbalance can also cause disturbances. Abnormal functioning of neurotransmitters leads to depression, anxiety disorders, apathy, irritability and other problems.
Mechanisms of personality development in psychology
In psychology, there are 2 mechanisms through which personality development occurs. The primary mechanism is identification. As a child, a child plays using various images on himself. The child finds the behavior of some adults interesting - and then these adults become role models whom he tries to be like. At a conscious young age, a person tries to find answers to the questions “who am I?”, “who do I want to become?” In adulthood - “what have I achieved?”, “what should I do to make life happen?” All this happens through identification of oneself with other people, encountered behavioral patterns, with constructed images.
Such methods of personality correction as trainings, including auto-training, work with affirmations, use the identification mechanism.
The mechanism of personality development that is opposite in its content is isolation. When it is activated, a person withdraws from his surroundings, closes himself off from communication, and develops traits and skills that would set him apart from others. Unlike identification, which is a method of socialization (that is, instilling generally accepted norms and attitudes in a person), isolation promotes individualization (that is, the development of unique characteristics). Human psychology presupposes the complementarity of the considered mechanisms of personality development.
Advice from experts: the path to self-development
People who are engaged in self-development have subordinated their lives to a specific idea, which they intensively carry out through practice, there is no time to get bored, waste time on comparison, envy.
They do not suppress their own consciousness. They are busy and enthusiastic. Perhaps the high level of stress slows down their development a little. But it's not a problem. The situation will change, you just need to put your life in order. Personal self-development techniques in psychology concern changes in physical, emotional and mental state.
Enough time to sleep
Reducing the amount of sleep below the required 6-7 hours is not worth it, because this is a path to stress due to increased cortisol levels. You need to optimize your regime: go to bed no later than 23:00. The production of growth hormone will help concentration and memory.
Favorite morning
In the morning, a rested nervous system is ready to perceive information. It is believed that this is the best time for memorization. Use it before stress builds up. Important decisions come in the morning.
Love healthy rituals: water with lemon, healthy breakfast. Walk to work while listening to audiobooks
Keeping your brain healthy is important.
Setting priorities
“I don’t have time” is a desire to please someone, but not yourself. Give priority to what will provide a foundation for the future - the implementation of the idea. Move towards your goal, and don’t sacrifice for the sake of one-day benefits and worries. They're not going anywhere.
Positive thoughts
Submit to events, count lessons? No, it is better to benefit from what is happening. No to humility, but to possibilities. Replace the question “For what?” with the question “For what?”. Analyze, ask questions, set goals. This is an example of the thinking and behavior of a person striving to become a better person.
Smile
A forced smile is only beautiful in appearance. Forcing yourself to smile all the time will not work. Therefore, you need to listen to yourself, notice not only the bad, but also the good. There are plenty of such feelings. This is a warm shower after a walk in the cold season, a cup of your favorite tea, an unexpected idea. Notice the pleasant things, watch nature, people on the street. Smile at the beautiful.
Design
There is no limit to perfection. The self-development project includes the steps necessary for self-realization. Supplement or change them as you achieve your goals.
