Bloom’s Whole Person Development Method: Reaching Your Desired Self

Leadership

Sep 30

In our article about the Current Self, we discussed how understanding the relationship between your personality and experiences can help you become aware of your emotions and learn to use them to achieve your goals. It is the “seed” in Bloom’s Whole Person Development Method. The Desired Self is about how you perceive these emotions and your desire for success – it is your idea of the “flower” that you hope to become.

As an entrepreneur or executive, you think of your relationships with others all the time, whether in considering how to motivate your employees or how to balance your social life with your work. All of that is important in the Current Self, which is how you live your life now. For the Desired Self, we’re going to focus on your relationship with your self. How do you view your goals? What brings you fulfillment?

Acknowledging and understanding these questions will help you reach the success you desire, which is the flower at the end of Whole Person Development.

Relationship with Self

Most of us have goals, even when we’re already successful – our relationship with that success is part of what makes us value our selves. Acknowledging that relationship is a large part of harnessing the Desired Self.

Being accomplished and feeling accomplished do not have to be separate, but they can be. In order to be successful, most of us have to fail sometimes. Our resistance to feeling ashamed of those failures can affect our motivation to keep working. It’s important to feel vulnerable but also to acknowledge that vulnerability is not a weakness. It’s another part of our selves that is worth valuing.

Our experiences build our Current Self into what it is – in that way, they are all valuable. However, to reach the Desired Self, we have to stop relying on them. As discovered in a study for the Harvard Business Review, experience can boost confidence, but not as much as self-awareness. Experience makes us rely on what we know already – awareness allows us to know our limitations so that we can close the gap between our dreams and reality. It allows us to learn new things about our selves.

This is how Whole Person Development teaches us to reach our Desired Self.

What Brings you Joy and Fulfillment

The emphasis on “desire” in the Desired Self is significant – it refers to how you hope to be seen by others and by yourself. This means that even though we all hope to use Whole Person Development to find success, the more appropriate term would be “fulfillment.”

What brings you joy? Not everyone can acknowledge what makes them truly happy. Whole Person Development teaches awareness of self so that we know what our definition of joy is. Growing and managing our selves to reach that joy closes the gap between who we hope to be and who we are.

If we do this, we can discover the areas in our lives that do not fulfill us, even if we once believed they did. For instance, we may be mistaking dissatisfaction with ourselves as a work problem when it’s actually a problem with our expectations for our social life.

Learning what brings us true fulfillment allows us to match our actions to our goals.

The Takeaway

The Desired Self is the flower in Whole Person Development. It’s what we hope to turn the Current Self into through awareness by improving our relationship with our selves. By understanding what brings us joy and fulfillment, we can change our actions to produce that joy rather than conflict with it.

As entrepreneurs, you want to achieve more success. Whole Person Development teaches you what your idea of success looks like so you can close any gaps you may still have between the things you do and the person you hope to be. Desire is essential, but awareness of how we define that desire is the best way to achieve it. This is how we define success in Whole Person Development.