Personal development is a broad term. As such, it needs to be defined more clearly than simply being explained by end results. Personal development (or self development) is the process of improving ones self. The most common definitions of personal development imply: improving self awareness or self knowledge, finding your identity, discovering your passion, improving your potential, enhancing the quality of your life, realizing your dreams, or fulfilling your aspirations. While all these are certainly parts of personal development, they better describe results from personal development and not what personal development actually is.

I personally view personal development as three parts working together that assist you in achieving some of the above descriptions. I like to remember the three parts by using the mnemonic "BEP": Beliefs, experience, power. How do all these interplay with one another? Simple. Lets start with beliefs, then get into the other two.

Beliefs are how accurate your view of reality is. This is the first step in personal development because you must constantly be forming more accurate views of reality in order to move onto the next level, experiences. Beliefs, and in particular limiting beliefs, are models of reality that hold little to no truth. For example, perhaps you hold the limiting belief that you will never be a millionaire. It is a limiting belief because it is not necessarily true. If others are doing it, if others are experiencing something you would like to, if others are having the results you want, why can't you do it as well? In fact you should be get a bit angry and curious over this. Ask yourself "why are they having results and I am not?" The first step comes down to over coming limiting beliefs and forming a more accurate view of reality.

Next we move on to experiences. More specifically, experiencing your desires. As you form a more accurate view of reality and crush your limiting beliefs, you now able to chose what experiences you wish to have. Experiences are critical to developing your self. By having the power (which we will touch on next) to decide what experience you want have manifested in your life, to be able to have the power to fulfill your desires, your better able to shape the direction of your life and become closer to your higher self.

Lastly is power or strength. The evolution of becoming stronger. As your developing a more accurate view of reality which enables you to fulfill your desires and experience the things you want. You develop a sense of power of your reality. That your able to achieve greater and greater and greater goals than you are right now. Put it another way, develop a feeling of power as you accomplishing things, and make things happen that you previously viewed as impossible.

So that is it, that is what personal development is. Three parts working together:

-Developing an accurate view of how reality works.
-Experiencing what you desire.
-Developing a sense of power as you make greater and greater changes in your life.

Author's Bio: 

David is the creative force behind a life coaching blog about personal development.