Personal Development Plan

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Before launching into the idea personal empowerment by way of a personal development plan, I need to address one of the fundamental concerns of most seekers of the truth:

Money.

The general consensus is that it is not possible to be ‘good’, ‘enlightened’ or ‘spiritual’ and wealthy at the same time. There is a belief, in western society at least, that money and ‘self-improvement’ are mutually exclusive and that ‘self-esteem’ is closely allied with financial success.

These ideas stem from the advent of the industrial revolution, which gave us the concept of going to a place of work in order to exchange time (labour) for money. The general perception was that the owners of the factories and industries became rich by exploiting the workers.

Here is where the idea of ‘rich people are bad’ came from and therefore to be good, enlightened or spiritual you had to be poor. We even have a vocabulary for it. “money is the root of all evil”, “poor but honest”, “filthy rich”, “filthy money” “ill gotten gains”, etc…etc.

Certainly when I was growing up as a working class lad in a coastal town in England, the accepted belief was that those who had plenty of money could only have got it by foul means or were born with it, (which means that it was originally acquired by foul means). It was therefore better to be spiritually pure and destitute than rich and evil.

This idea is further reinforced by religious orders of all kinds that have vows of poverty. Although, it must be said, that the vow of poverty is more to do with focusing attention on the spiritual aspects of the religion by removing the distractions of the material world, than a dichotomy between the two.

The historical development of this ‘one or the other’ line of thinking has led to a couple of preconceptions (beliefs and thoughts) about success that do not serve spiritually minded people and may be preventing them from achieving their ideal of personal development.

One is that having a successful personal development plan means that you need to be a good person as judged by societal norms and the second is that material success is not really a spiritual thing and may detract from personal development.

Those who are materialistically minded, on the other hand, also have a couple of preconceptions about personal development that do not serve them and may be preventing them from achieving their ideal of success.

One is that spiritual principles have nothing to do with material success and may detract from success, and the second is that personal development is a matter of doing certain things, not about being a certain way.

The reality is that personal development is a holistic thing. The material is inseparable from the spiritual. The spiritual is inseparable from the material. Spiritual personal development without material personal development is as empty and meaningless as is material personal development without spiritual personal development.

There are plenty of spiritual masters out there who can teach you spiritual personal development and a plethora of courses on financial personal development.

The bottom line is that spiritual and material personal development, go hand in hand. Choose the personal development plan that will set you on this course.

Choose wisely.