I refer to the type of personal development that I teach through SOELmethod as Enlightened Personal Development because it combines, what I think are, the best ancient techniques used by the Eastern enlightenment traditions with the best of modern western personal development techniques.
Traditionally, the path of enlightenment and the path of personal development have headed off in divergent directions, using different techniques. But gradually, some aspects of the enlightenment path, such as meditation, have been finding their way into the personal development path. At SOELmethod I take this to the next level, by blend the two in the most practical way possible.
In this article, I will describe the three existing styles of personal development: motivational, therapeutic, and New Age. Then I’ll explain that the core elements of the enlightenment path are somewhat incompatible with core elements of the personal development path, but that if you leave out the extremist elements of the enlightenment ideology, then it makes perfectly logical sense to blend the two.
To highlight the apparently irreconcilable differences between the two paths, all you have to do is caricature them. The personal development path would be: “Get more of what you want, as quickly as possible.” The enlightenment path would be: “You don’t need anything else, be satisfied with what you have right now.”
When I first encountered the enlightenment path, I had already been fully invested in the personal development path for a few years, and for a while I couldn’t see how to make the two fit together. Luckily, I gradually I figured it out.
The Personal Development Aspect
The personal development (personal growth) path has always been fairly wide, encompassing a broad range of approaches. I categorize it into the following three styles:
- Motivational
- Therapeutic
- New Age
They all include some therapeutic elements, but the Motivational style replaces a lot of the deeper therapeutic elements with goal setting and motivational elements, and the New Age style tends to replace the deeper therapeutic elements with spiritual elements.
SOELmethod’s Enlightened Personal Development builds on the Therapeutic style and takes it to an even deeper level.
I’ll briefly cover the 3 styles:
Motivational Personal Development
The Motivational style is big on inspirational speeches and is typified by people such as Tony Robbins. It’s popular in sales departments and multi-level marketing companies. It predominantly consists of convincing you that:
- you should dream big because
- you deserve to get everything that you want, and that
- you are capable of getting it, and
- all you have to do is believe in yourself, prioritize, and focus on getting it.
It’s an extremely seductive, feel-good message. It’s a shame that, for most people, it doesn’t deliver what it promises. To feel how magnetically attractive the Motivational style of personal development can be, watch the following short video of Tony Robbins, master motivational speaker, in full flight in the 1980s.
Of course, the Motivational style of personal development does deliver benefits, especially in the short-to-medium term, otherwise it wouldn’t have become as popular as it is. It might work well for you, if your main problem is that you’ve been unfocused and slacking off, but most people are dealing with different issues. And it’s more likely to work for the type of person who is already fairly ambitious, and is also quite conscientious: the motivational speeches inspire them to set even more ambitious goals, and to work even harder to achieve those goals.
But even for those who succeed through this Motivational method, it can be a limited, hollow success. The flaws that keep Motivational personal development from delivering the ultimate improvement in quality of life can be seen in the abovementioned video, where Tony Robbins’ defines success as:
“…doing what I want, when I want, where I want, with whomever I want, as much as I want, in a way that, hopefully [but not necessarily], also benefits other people simultaneously.”
The three flaws inherent in that definition are that:
- It’s all about ‘doing’ instead of being.
- It’s all about ‘I want,’ which draws attention to what is lacking rather than to what is already here.
- He’s not wanting the right things! He’s wanting external things instead of internal things, which ties back in with the first flaw of ‘doing’ instead of being.
The third flaw is the really major one—the misidentification of what people really want. Motivational personal development primarily concerns itself with satisfying surface-level wants: external things such as houses, cars, luxury goods, vacations, an attractive partner, career, power, maybe fame. It rarely looks beneath those surface-level things to find what you really want, and to see what’s preventing you from getting it.
The external things that Motivational personal development tends to focus on are what’s known as instrumental goals (with instrumental value) because they are only intermediaries— stepping stones, a ‘means to an end’—that you use to get to the final goals that have the actual intrinsic value (what you really want). The final goals that people want are: happiness, safety and security, a sense of peace, a feeling of belonging, being appreciated, being loved, etc.