Too often, people associate personal growth and development with prayer and meditation or with personal experiences with friends and family and loved ones. Too often, these same people then go to work every day, and don't consider this a very fertile environment be a place where a massive amount of personal growth is possible for all of us. We will spend the majority of the time, we are adults on this earth, working in one form or another, and always with others.

For those of you who think that because they sit at home and do things by themselves, their jobs don't consist of interacting with others, it would be useful for them to think again.

If you are working for someone, you need to be interacting with him or her on a regular basis. If you have your own business, you need to be interacting with your clients. And the truth is, when you are interacting... no matter what the context... you have the opportunity for personal growth.

personal development planning & engineering

It useful to know where it is you want to be... that way you'll know when you're heading there. You can then know to adjust when you get off course. As simple as this sounds most people don't take this first important step. Would you even think of getting in a car and driving to let's say in New York City, if you had no idea where New York City was? You could drive and drive and drive at high frantic speeds for a long long time and may be, by accident you would get there. What makes much more sense is to get directions first and then head off.

This is where the analogy between going to New York City and traveling down the road of personal growth end, however.

Unfortunately for the linear minded, personal development does not happen in a neat and orderly fashion.

You may think that reading a book or attending a seminar on the subject of goal setting on personal development could do the trick, but in reality, it never does. You can always have a general sense, but the one thing that you can count on is that things you didn't count on will appear along the way. When that happens, it is most useful to be able to adjust quickly, so that you can resume your journey. This can happen as easily as when you are having a disagreement with a coworker as well as when you are hugging a loved one.

So I'm afraid that the position of executive assistant to the personal development department head doesn't really exist- in the context that I am referring to it here. That art therapy for personal growth class isn't being held after work. The time and the opportunity is right in the middle of the day.

There are those that do personal intervention in organisational development for a living. One thing they remember that most others don't is that each individual's presence at the workplace affects the organization as a whole. Just having this knowledge as a starting point can make these kinds of people incredibly effective.

So stop thinking that your development is a solitary process- only to be considered before and after the workday, or in a place of worship on a particular day of the week. Everything you do affects the others you interact with. Everything the others you interact with to affect you. So what are you waiting for?