Bloom’s Whole Person Development Method: Understanding Your Current Self
As an entrepreneur or executive, you implicitly understand how staying motivated to achieve your goals allows you to find success, but you may not know how best to motivate yourself and others to do so. Bloom’s Whole Person Development Method helps you overcome the gaps in your personality that create conflict. People coached in this method discover the ability to use this awareness to better align their values to their goals, both personal and professional.
Whole Person Development begins with recognizing and understanding your Current Self. This self is the result of your perspective, how your life experiences influence how you view yourself and others. We think of it as the seed from which people who receive Whole Person Development coaching grow into a more desired state, one that is more motivated, introspective, empathetic, and successful.
Read on to learn how to recognize your Current Self using Whole Person Development and why this is important.
Emotional Intelligence
Changing our Current Self and making it bloom into a more Desired Self requires that we acknowledge the emotions that make our Current Self act the way it does. This requires understanding our emotional intelligence, which refers to how well we understand both our own emotions and the emotions of others.
Normally, our feelings about our selves and others come and go without us realizing it. Whole Person Development teaches us to name those feelings, to become aware of them and understand them. By doing so, we can better utilize those emotions in our thinking, to solve the problems we face in our daily lives. This leads to more balance overall.
Through this method, you can learn how your emotions affect you. You can then identify these emotions in others and have a more productive relationship with them. This leads to more than emotional awareness. According to the Industrial Psychology Journal, emotional intelligence is directly related to organizational effectiveness and job satisfaction.
Personality
Our personality affects our ability to recognize conflict between our goals and actions. For example, you may believe that a lack of satisfaction in your career stems from not working hard enough, even when your personality already makes you work harder than you need to.
Whole Person Development coaching can help you see past your personality’s desire to solve everything with work and realize that your lack of satisfaction comes from an inactive social life (the reverse could also be true). Without acknowledging and understanding your personality and where your emotions come from, you would be less able to see how your Current Self needs to change to achieve your goals.
Life Experiences
Our emotional reactions to the things around us may seem like our choices, but they are based more on our life experiences than our conscious desires. For instance, reacting negatively to work is likely less the result of a conscious decision to hate work than of your experience with being unsatisfied in your career.
This applies to how we view others as well. Bad experiences with certain people can affect how we respond to similar people in the future. Only by acknowledging how experiences guide our emotions can we learn to form new emotions consciously, rather than automatically. This is how we increase our emotional intelligence.
The Takeaway
The Current Self is the seed in Whole Person Development, the thing that we hope will grow and bloom into a more desired state. After it does so, the Current Self doesn’t disappear, but remains as one of the important petals on the new flower, continuing to guide our awareness and emotional identity.
How we think of ourselves and respond to others greatly influences how we deal with problems in our lives. Empathy changes our personality to respond to people with an open mind, which leads to different life experiences that emphasize awareness.
These thoughts are a part of acknowledging the role of the Current Self in Whole Person Development. By doing so, you can understand the thoughts and feelings that have made you who you are and, with the proper coaching, begin to change them to achieve greater success.
Meredith Wailes is the president of Bloom Leadership.
Her goal is to eliminate suffering in the workforce by creating exceptional value and growth for business and entrepreneurs.
For more information on how we achieve this please check out Bloom Leadership.
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