Self Improvement

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Being Human

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The Personal Development Industry   By Bad Bob


The personal development industry can be organized into a surprising number of categories and sub categories and can range from the easy stuff, like physical fitness and weight control, to really scary subjects, like improving personality traits or emotional problems or even improving our thinking skills. But does this industry and the consumers who take advantage of it need to be held to a higher standard of responsibility?


Personal Development Industry


Personal development is a general category that represents a broad range of resources with an equally broad range of perceived benefits.

Whether you have identified a need for improvement in the area of physical fitness, weight control, or if you think you have the courage to tackle more fundamental issues like personality and attitude problems, or even the subject of life scripts, which deal with how we basically see ourselves and can impact our success or failure in life, the information is out there.

However, does the consumer/user of information have to bring a little something to the table as well as the industry providers?
As broad as the phrase personal development is, there are a few concepts that represent common threads throughout the personal development theme.

One of which is personal empowerment. This includes the concept of personal power which is given extensive lip service in support of an endless array of agendas. However, where lip service ends and action begins problems sometimes arise.

The problem here is that personal power comes with an attachment called personal responsibility which isn't real high on any popularity list in today's civilization.

But since personal power is the ring that rules them all, so to speak, the problem of personal responsibility must be overcome, or all efforts in the area of personal development will result in best case, temporary solutions, worse case, nothing more than token gestures designed to deceive ourselves into believing that we have really done something real.

Personal Power


This package consists of desire, decision, commitment, determination and patience, and nowhere is the personal power package more necessary than in the area of self improvement and personal development.

This is part of that little something that we as consumers must bring to the table that we mentioned earlier. We need to exercise our personal power from the start in order to research the information out there so that we can distinguish the valuable from the marginal information.

Once we identify the good information sources and valuable information, we need to apply that basic success formula, the package, to our efforts in using the information we acquire to our benefit.

Why is all this necessary? Because navigating the personal development landscape can be overwhelming and just because the information is out there doesn't mean that its valuable information.


Personal Responsibility


Do those of us who provide products for this industry whether hard products or informational, have a slightly higher level of responsibility than providers in the normal market place? Why? Simply because this is about people's welfare and quality of life on a very basic level.

We may not think that weight control is a serious matter, but if so, that would reflect a level of ignorance that this industry may not be able to afford in the long run. This industry by its very nature should hold itself to a higher standard and not just blow off our responsibility by direct or veiled references to the so overused justification, caveat emptor (buyer beware).

We are not talking about government regulation here. We're talking about personal responsibility and a caring collaboration between consumers and those who provide the needed resources in a very special industry.