The Personal Growth Model: What Is It and How to Use It

Are you looking for personal growth, whether intellectually, emotionally, spiritually or physically?

Are you wondering how to make use of self-help tactics to improve yourself?

This article will talk about a Personal Growth Model that explains the cycle of personal development, and how it will shape you as a person.

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The Personal Growth Model

The Mind Elevator’s Personal Growth Model shows five important steps in your personal development, including belief, plan, action, result and review.

What’s so special about the Personal Growth Model?

This Model lists out five important steps that will lead to personal growth, helping you to attain the improvement you have been looking for in all aspects.

Belief

To kickstart this progress, you will first have to change your beliefs. This would include:

• The way you perceive effort and success, in other words, your mindset
• The things you believe are instrumental to you attaining your goals
• The identity you endorse, including how you perceive yourself. What are your advantages and disadvantages? Who do you want to be?
• The values you adopt. What are the things that you believe are important in your life? What are your priorities?

Plan

Next, we have plans. This isn’t just about your to-do list, but everything from goal-setting to strategising your work.

• Set effective goals that can motivate you
• Organise your information, time and tasks
• Formulate strategies to work towards your goal

Action

Now it’s the hardest part. Taking actions and working towards your goal. 

• Executing your plans step-by-step
• Developing habits that are conducive to your plans
• Making use of productivity tactics and skills and maximise your effectiveness

Result

Results can come in many different forms, depending on the nature of your plan and actions. Common forms of results would include:

• The outcome of your action, including the word product, your academic results, etc.
• The reward you obtain from your action, that can be a feeling you receive after your action.
• The feedback you receive from your supervisor, your peers, or the recipient/audience of your action.

Review

Finally, after receiving your result, you should then conduct a review to trigger this Personal Growth Model again. This can be done by:

• Evaluating and tracking your progress 
• Assessing how your actions have been leading to your goal
• Re-designing strategies to help you reach your goal faster

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A Personal Growth Cycle?

Why is this Personal Growth Model a cycle?

Your results and your evaluation of your results will directly affect your beliefs, hence shaping your values, mindset and your identity. In other words, your results will impact how you perceive yourself.

How do your Result and Review affect your Beliefs?

Now let’s take the example of a compliment regarding your work product given by your instructor/supervisor.

After receiving the compliment, you should review your work based on the comment and identify areas for improvement and aspects that you did well. The review will help you identify your competitive edge and skills that require further improvement.

Because of the compliment and your evaluation, you will believe in your ability and hard work. The process will also shape your identity as you gain a better understanding of yourself and your capability. You will also identify areas that you wish to work on and believe that these brushing up your skills in these areas will help you become even more capable.

This is how your values, beliefs and identities are affected by your result.

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An Example: Developing the Habit of Reading

Now that we have understood that the Model is a cycle, with each aspect influencing another, It is vital for us to know how to make changes in each of the steps to attain personal development.

A common new year resolution that many wish to adopt for intellectual growth would be to read more.

Now how to kickstart the habit of reading more?

First, you have to believe that reading is a useful way to help you attain intellectual growth and expand your knowledge.

Next, you have to set a goal for yourself and make plans to read every day.

Then, you will have to execute your plan and start to take action and read every day according to your plan.

By starting to build this habit of reading, you will see results. You will have, for example, finished one book after a week.

Finally, you will review your progress. This can be done by using a habit-tracking app that will help you keep track of how well you have been sticking to the habit of reading. You can also evaluate how much you have learned through reading and design strategies that can help you further utilise your reading time, for example, by taking notes.

This completes a cycle of the Personal Growth Model. As you can see, by changing your belief, this results in developing plans, then taking actions, then achieving results.

By reviewing your results, you will then adjust your beliefs and design strategies that can further your progress in achieving your goal. This will lead to another cycle of positive behaviour based on your newly formulated strategy, like taking notes when reading.

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How can I apply the Personal Growth Model?

Personal development involves so much more. There are many areas to be explored in every category.

Looking at plans, we may wonder how we can set effective goals, or how we can use different tools available to design a good work plan.

Regarding action, one widely discussed topic would be how we can hack our productivity and increase our effectiveness.

As you can see, a wide variety of personal development discussion is encompassed in this Personal Growth Model.

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Related read:

• How to Plan Personal Growth with Growth Planners
• Change Your Life by Developing a Growth Mindset
• Systematic Goal Setting to Achieve Your Goals Effectively
• Use Personal PDCA to Achieve Your Goals
• How to Master the STAR Method in Interviews and CVs
• How to Create a Powerful and Effective Elevator Pitch
• Three Key Elements to Nurturing Leadership
• Managing the Constant Search for Motivation