PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

MODULE 1: KNOWING ONESELF

Lesson 1: Self Concept

Imagine yourself looking into a mirror. What do you see? Do you see your ideal self or your actual
self? Your ideal self is the self that you aspire to be. It is the one that you hope will possess characteristics
like that of a mentor or some other worldly figure. Your actual self, however, is the one that you see. It is the
self that has characteristics that you were nurtured or in some cases, born to have.
The actual self and the ideal self are two broad categories of self-concept. Self-concept refers to
your awareness of yourself. It is the construct that negotiates these two selves. In other words, it connotes
first the identification of the ideal self as separate from others and second is that it encompasses all the
behaviors evaluated in the actual self that you engage in to reach the ideal self.
It is believed that the words “Know Thyself” which were written at the entry of the oracle at Delphi by
seven Greek philosophers, statesmen and lawgivers became the cornerstone of Western philosophy.
> For Socrates, the most important thing to pursue was self -knowledge and admitting one’s ignorance is the
beginning of true knowledge.
> For Plato, one of Socrates’ students, the beginning of knowledge is self- knowledge.
> Other ancient philosophers from other culture saw the wisdom in knowing oneself.
> The ancient Hindu writings Upanishads confirmed “Enquiry into the truth of the “Self” is knowledge”.
> The Persian poet Rumi ruminated “Who am I in the midst of all this thought traffic?” and
> The American poet Walt Whitman celebrated his “Self” as a “simple and separate person.”
The actual self is built on self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is derived from social interactions that
provide insight into how others react to you. The actual self is who we are. It is how we think, how we feel,
look, and act. The actual self can be seen by others but because we have no way of truly knowing how others
view us, the actual self is our self-image.
The ideal self, on the other hand, is how we want to be. It is an idealized image that we have
developed over time based on what we have learned and experienced. The ideal self could include
components of what our parents have taught us, what we admire in others, what our society promotes, and
what we think best interests us.
How to know oneself? We must define first the concept of the “Self”. In philosophical terms, it is the
being which is the source of a person’s consciousness. It is the agent responsible for an individual’s thoughts
and actions. Based on this definition, the “Self” is an intangible entity that directs a person’s thoughts and
actions. It is outside the physical realm of the person.
The “Self” is the essence of a person: his thoughts, feelings and actions, experiences, beliefs, values,
principles, and relationships. The “Self’ includes a person’s life purpose, meaning and aspirations.
 If the “Self” is defined as the cognitive and affective representation of one’s identity, it is then defined
in terms of human characteristics such as behavior and thought.
Personal Effectiveness
Personal effectiveness means making use of all the personal resources-talents, skills, energy, and
time to enable you to achieve goals. Our personal effectiveness depends on our innate characteristics-talent
and experience accumulated in the process of personal development. Talents first are needed to be identified
and then developed to be used in a particular subject area (science, literature, sports, politics, etc.)
Experience includes knowledge and skills that we acquire in the process of cognitive and practical
activities.
Knowledge is required for setting goals and defining an action plan to achieve them and risk
assessment.
Skills also determine whether real actions are performed in accordance with the plan. If the same
ability is used many times in the same situation, then it becomes a habit that runs automatically,
subconsciously. Here are some skills that will greatly increases the efficiency of any person who owns them:
1. Determination. It allows you to focus only in achieving a specific goal without being distracted by less
important things or spontaneous desires. It may be developed with the help of self-discipline exercise.
2. Self-Confidence. It appears in the process of personal development as a result of getting aware of
yourself, your actions and their consequences. Self-confidence is manifested in speech, appearance,
dressing, gait, and physical condition. To develop it, you need to learn about yourself and your capabilities,
gain positive attitude and believe that by performing right actions and achieving right goals you will certainly
reach success.
3. Persistence. It makes you keep moving forward regardless of emerging obstacles-problems, laziness,
bad emotional state, etc. It reduces the costs of overcoming obstacles. It can also be developed with the help
of self-discipline exercise.
4. Managing Stress. It helps combat stress that arises in daily life from the environment and other people.
Stress arises from the uncertainty in an unknown situation when a lack of information creates the risk of
negative consequences of your actions. It increases efficiency. In the actively changing environment.
5. Problem-solving skills. They help cope with the problems encountered with a lack of experience. It
increases efficiency by adopting new ways of achieving goals when obtaining a new experience.
6. Creativity. It allows to find extraordinary ways to carry out a specific action that no one has tried to use. It
can lead to decrease or an increase of costs. But usually, the speed of action is greatly increased when using
creative tools.
7. Generating ideas. It helps you achieve goals using new, original, unconventional ideas. For generating
idea, you can use a method of mental maps which allows you to materialize, visualize and scrutinize all your
ideas, which in turn contributes to the emergence of new ideas.
Build on Your Strengths and Work on Your Weaknesses
Instead of giving up or indulging in self-pity, take action. Go for speech lessons, get skills upgrading,
attend personality development sessions or whatever appropriate remedies to your perceived weakness.
 Instead of simply focusing on your weaknesses, recognize your own talents and abilities, build on
them and utilize them to your greatest advantage. This is where you can build your name and popularity.

Build on your
strengths and work on
your weaknesses.

Lesson 2: I Am Unique

Knowing oneself basically is an advantage to understand the inner and outer you. But understanding
why every person is unique ignites our tolerance and acceptance with each other.
Uniqueness is defined in different ways and here are some of the collective definitions:
1. Being the only one or SOLE.
2. A person who has distinct characteristics.
3. The quality of being unique or unusual in some special way.
4. A state or condition wherein someone or something is unlike anything else in comparison.
These definitions provide us a vivid thought that each of us possesses peculiarity or differentiation
from each other.
Jack Nollan (2020) of A Conscious Rethink.com coined 10 Things that Make a Person Unique. These
include (1) PERSONALITY that stretches from the day a person started to see and experience life in the
world leading to gathering information, knowledge, acquiring skills, possessing emotional responses, and
making choices differently from other people; (2) ATTITUDE that becomes the anchor of becoming either
positive or negative in life, perceiving how people act in front of you, and an offshoot of your emotional
landscape; (3) EXPERIENCES that shape you on how you act and behave today. If you experienced
negative, you tend to behave anxious or defensive; however, some would deal with it as a motivator while
experiencing positive that improves your senses in understanding the world; (4) HABITS that normally we do
every day in our lives such as our eating habit, personal hygiene practices, meditation exercises, and trying
new things. Cliché’ but as they always say and globally accepted and favored, “You are what you do, not
what you say you’ll do” and that makes you unique from others; (5) CREATIVITY such as dancing, painting,
singing, producing useful things out of scrap materials, defining beauty in a different way and perspective
makes you unique; (6) PERSPECTIVE saying that no other people understands the world as you do because
they do not live like exactly 24 hours beside you. Your experience is not the same with others’, your body of
knowledge is not the same as theirs. That is why the gaps are filled from each own unique perspective to
continuously develop and improve; (7) TASTE that is a unique facet of you because you have different likes
and dislikes from other people; (8) GOALS that are set in different manners depending on how you create
steps and procedures in achieving those; (9) HOBBIES that improves your personal growth and mental
health such as gardening, cooking, and gaming; and (10) PASSION that provides direction toward a goal or
experience that will allow us to leave a unique mark in this world such as involvement in philanthropic activities
like giving and supporting people in need.
These 10 things that make people unique from others greatly show that individuals have their own
set of characteristics that can be shown to the world.
Problem arises due to the limitation of widening each horizon in accepting and facing people
worldwide. In the United States of America, some people who experienced discrimination were reported due
to individual differences such as in race, religion, color of the skin, hobbies, language, and personality. In the
Philippine setting, one of the primary social issues in terms of difference is the acceptance of what we call as
categorized in the LGBTQ community seeking for equality in work, school, and facilities.
Diversity is also one term that is parallel of being unique. It has been a major advocacy of some in
the world since we differ in culture, tradition, and belief particularly on how we perceived ourselves individually
based on who nurtured us and the nature or location that we are in.
"Diversity" means more than just acknowledging and/or tolerating difference. (JPantaleo, 2020) Diversity is
a set of conscious practices that involve:
• Understanding and appreciating interdependence of humanity, cultures, and the natural environment.
• Practicing mutual respect for qualities and experiences that are different from our own.
• Understanding that diversity includes not only ways of being but also ways of knowing;
• Recognizing that personal, cultural and institutionalized discrimination creates and sustains privileges for
some while creating and sustaining disadvantages for others;
• Building alliances across differences so that we can work together to eradicate all forms of discrimination.
In a specific sense of being a unique person, Big Five, and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator can
guide you in determining your personality traits or characteristics by Costa and McRae (1992).
IG FIVE
Low Score High Score
1. Extroversion – the ability to Loner Joiner
socialize and belongingness is Quiet Talkative
his concern. Passive Active
Reserved Affectionate
2. Agreeableness – possessing Suspicious Trusting
trust and openness to others. Critical Lenient
Ruthless Soft-hearted
Irritable Good-natured
3. Conscientiousness – the Negligent Conscientious
possession of mind setting and Lazy Hard-working
goal oriented. Disorganized Well Organized
Late Punctual
4. Neuroticism – a person who Worried
Calm Temperamental
Even-tempered Self-Conscious
 experiences anxiety, and Comfortable Emotional
emotionally and physical Unemotional
conscious.
5. Openness to Experience – a Down-to-Earth Imaginative
person who goes with the flow, Uncreative Creative
widening horizons, and being Conventional Original
resourceful. Uncurious Curious

These personality traits as one measurement in determining our own personal characteristics can
be easily memorized and identified with an acronym of OCEAN. The table is subdivided into 2 scores which
include lower scores and higher scores. Low score means you do not possess the dimension and high score
means you have the dimension as your characteristic. For example, if you tend to determine if you possess
extroversion in a rating of 1-5 with which 1 is the lowest and 5 is the highest, let’s say when you rate yourself
in the score of 1 in this dimension then it shows that you may be identified as being a lonely person, quiet,
passive, or reserved. The same as with other dimensions. In this manner, you can easily categorize your
characteristics as a person.
The summation of being a unique one has been advantageous not only to oneself but with other
people leading towards Understanding, Tolerance, and Acceptance. These 3 things fused together to help
each other perceive ourselves as an individual with different characteristics, habits, and experiences.
The basic concept of understanding is when we know ourselves and our ability to understand the
feelings of others, and vice versa, tolerance is associated with willingness to accept behavior and beliefs that
are different from your own with fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions,
practices, race, religion, nationality, etc. differ from one's own; freedom from bigotry, although you might not
agree with or approve of them such as in the example of religion where scriptures are not alike with the
religion that you have, and acceptance is simply the process of assenting or recognizing a process or
condition without attempting to change, protest, or exit. (Fish, Jefferson M. 2014).
With the existence of being a unique one, how could you possibly share your own characteristics,
habits, and experiences confidently? Now, you may stand in the mirror and reflect after answering the
question “Who am I?” from the previous lesson. Now, you can tell to yourself, “I know that I am a sole being.
I know what I am capable of. I know the things that make me relaxed and comfortable. I know that I am
molded because of what I have experienced. And with these, I understand others.”

You have enhanced your

knowledge now with the new
learnings you have acquired.
You may now explore!

Note: Visit the video link below to further enhance your knowledge.
SHS Personal Development Q1 Ep1: Knowing Oneself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs0txLU2DUs&t=471s