The personal development market is booming : double-digit growth in sales of " self-help " books; 30% to 40% of companies' training budget dedicated to coaching ; exponential increase in the offer of advice promising to reverse one's stress into positive energy, to boost one's self-confidence, to (re)find one's balance, to reconcile body and mind, to reconnect with one's being-self and pacify one's relationships with one's interiority, to gain serenity if not wisdom, Deploy your assertiveness and your ability to communicate effectively, assume your true vocations, maintain your motivation and reveal your hidden resources, inspire yourself and nurture your creativity, free your audacity, love yourself and even find happiness...
What is this need for personal development all about? Is it an invention of the twenty-first century that would meet the challenges of a separate era? We take stock of the currents of personal development, its histrological inscription, the various reasons for the craze it arouses and the critical eye that it must necessarily call for.
A practical philosophy of well-being in oneself and with others
Personal development could be defined as working on oneself aimed at putting into practice a philosophy of life that allows one to feel better individually and to maintain better quality relationships with one's environment.
The practical dimension is essential : personal development promises concrete advice among other " tips " and promotes experience as a method of appropriating the keys to well-being.
From personal support (such as coaching) to interaction with a " mirror effect" (such as in mentoring), through organizational methodologies (such as GTD, among others) or experiential workshops aimed at producing " clicks " and more meditative approaches (mindfulness, for example), personal development means us Concretely help to change the way we look at life, if not to change our lives.
Brief overview of the trends in modern personal development
Think positive !
" Modern " personal development, as we know it today, has its origins in psychotherapeutic methods inherited from behaviorism. Its date of (re)birth can be set at the 1950s, when Pastor Norman Vincent Peale coined the concept of " positive thinking" and enjoyed immense success with the book he devoted to it in 1952 (The Power of Positive Thinking).
To exaggerate the line, he tells us that seeing the glass half full (and chasing away the frustrations that the glass half empty causes us): stop complaining, enjoy the simple joys of life, etc., it makes you less of a pain in the ass for others, but also genuinely better in your own skin, by the grace of the good old Coué method and everything that proceeds from autosuggestion.
Forty years later, positive psychology goes further by promising fulfillment or even happiness to those who increase their quality of life by working on their strengths, aligning their values with their appetites and skills, by strengthening their empathy and their capacity for compassion (towards oneself as well as towards others). by welcoming their emotions and developing their resilience skills.
Reconcile your selves !
Transactional analysis, deployed in the 1960s based on Jung's work on archetypes, highlights the relationships between the different selves (the internalized parent who represents morality, the sleeping child who carries the affects, and the conscious adult who exercises self-control with rationality): Our individuality is multiple and complex, worked by inner tensions, and in order to find peace as well as to maintain better relationships with others, we must make our different " selves " dialogue in order to rely on what cements the load-bearing wall of our personality.
Develop your soft-skills to succeed in your life project!
In the 1970s, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) made the distinction between know-how and interpersonal skills: being competent according to the criteria of a professional mission sheet and/or standardized social expectations is not enough to get by in life ; It is also necessary to develop interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence, build and cultivate an open posture... And to do this, we must start by turning back to ourselves, fighting our limiting beliefs and clarifying ourselves with our own needs, aspirations and interests.
Daniel Levinson and his theory of the " seasons of life " complete the picture by praising the Dream (with a capital R), a primary ambition to be fully the person we idealize to become in order to direct all the mobilization of one's resources towards the completion of this life project. Here, personal development rhymes with success !
What if we accepted each other more, to better engage ?
The third generation of cognitive and behavioral therapies calls into question this somewhat ecstatic vision of the superpowers of positive thinking (whose ability to " chase " away so-called negative thoughts has not been demonstrated) and above all wants to break with the injunctional tone of certain personal development discourses that speak too readily to the imperative (dare ! move ! change ! boost! etc.)
Moreover, by positioning happiness and success as goals, some approaches to personal development would only maintain a culture of overperformance, by only shifting the object of competition to the field of well-being.
So, movements such as ACT propose to give up trying to improve oneself and instead accept oneself as one is, with one's faults, fears, so-called " negative " thoughts, paradoxes, intimate disorders, and to work so that all of this no longer constitutes an obstacle to commitment (i.e. embarking on the accomplishment of projects that are important to oneself). It's not about reversing your flaws into strengths, but about moving forward with them, focusing on your values (i.e. what really matters to you).
The historical depth of questioning the self in the world
Epicureanism : pleasure and virtue, the equation of happiness
Already Epicurus, in the third century BC, distinguished the negative side from the positive side of everyone, which would not be without inspiring positive psychology. For Epicurus, happiness comes through the search for pleasures that divert frustrations and suffering.
We aim for hedonism, but a hedonism " reasoned " by virtue. Seeking happiness alone is useless, and can even lead to neglecting or sacrificing the well-being of others.
So, we must balance the quest for one's own fulfillment with a morality of attention to others. The spirit of " conscience ", the " need for meaning " and the feeling of " responsibility " that we talk about a lot today owe a lot to the Epicurean philosophy that articulates individual happiness and relational ecology.
Thinking for oneself, opening up to the world with Marcus Aurelius
Five centuries after Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius delivered his Thoughts for Oneself, a collection of epigrams addressing pell-mell the question of self-reflection, duty to others, useful forces for overcoming trials, the purpose of existence...
A few quotes say more than all the discourses on the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius and his contributions to contemporary approaches to personal development: " He who lives in peace with himself lives in peace with the universe " (Nonviolent Communication), " Nothing is advantageous that makes you lose self-respect " (self-esteem), " Before you speak, one must be able to read on his face what you are going to say " (non-verbal communication), " The characteristic of man is to love even those who offend him" (resilience), " No one tires of being helped. Aid is an act in accordance with nature. Never tire of receiving or bringing it" (gift and counter-gift), " Develop independence in yourself at all times, with kindness, simplicity and modesty " (empowerment), " When you get up in the morning, remember how precious is the privilege of living, breathing, being happy " (positive psychology), " Enter as much as possible into the soul of the one who speaks to you" (empathy), " Reject opinion and you will be saved " (decision-making bias), " Gentleness is invincible " (benevolence)...
Pascal : in search of the meaning of existence
We now go to the seventeenth century to meet Pascal, who, with his robust methodological foundation as a mathematician, but also with a famous mystical experience that saw him fervently convert to spirituality, develops a philosophy of the meaning of existence. His Pensées (1669) stipulates that we are beings of three orders : the order of the body (which addresses us to physical needs), the order of the mind (which appeals to our reason), and the order of the heart (which turns us towards emotions and the relationship with others).
Aspiring to the infinite, we can obviously only get closer to it, by making these three orders work together in a quest for harmony. All approaches to personal development that emphasize inner reconciliation, through a necessary distance from the gaze of others, owe a lot to Pascal.
Spinoza : ethics as a source of happiness
We move a few meters through the shelves of the philosophical library to (re)open Spinoza's Ethics . Presented today as THE philosopher of happiness that every Chief Happiness Officer should know like the back of his hand, Spinoza is a proponent of eudaemonism, a virtuous encounter between listening to one's own desires, the fundamental aspiration for freedom and the concern to participate in the world by contributing to collective progress.
At the heart of Spinoza's theory is the power of joy : it is necessary to accumulate moments of pure enjoyment, even fleeting, in order to attain intensity in happiness. We strengthen ourselves daily in the succession of satisfactions and then, we are better equipped to face difficulties and above all stronger and more inspired to act.
What is the current craze for personal development all about?
Rapid and incessant transformations of our environments...
This non-exhaustive mapping of modern currents of personal development and the philosophical inspirations on which they feed can only prove right the common sense that everyone aspires to feel good in themselves and with others.
But this does not yet give any indication of the current craze for personal development that the phenomenal commercial success testifies to. What could have happened in the last two decades that so many of us are concerned about our happiness and the meaning of our presence in the world! The radical and rapid transformations of all our environments (work, family, society, etc.), of course !
… Loss of reference points
We had fairly stable benchmarks to determine what made us someone and therefore what we had to do with (and in) our lives. And now everything is postponed and caused : we knew more or less what success meant, and we see that the project of having a good job, a good salary, a good social position is less realistic than it was, in addition to not being as satisfactory as it seems ; We had professional objectives to achieve and processes to guide us, and now we are asked above all for agility among other soft-skills ; We knew and mastered (more or less) the codes of relations between genders, generations and cultures, and now inclusion is essential to follow the movements of the economy and society, forcing us to review our perceptions of our sex, our age, our culture as well as our modes of relationship with others...
Multiplication of areas and times of discomfort
Not to mention the fact that this movement of incessant and diligent transformations requires enormous efforts from us, even exhausts us! We want a break, we need moments of inspiration, of taking a step back. We also want easy-to-implement solutions to get by on a daily basis, right now, with this chaotic context that makes us uncomfortable several times a day. It is this urgency to find our way in a world undergoing profound changes that the craze for personal development is the name.
For a constructive critique of personal development
Can we be held to the impossible?
But what is the real scope of personal development in the face of challenges as massive as fundamental social, economic and cultural transformations that impact 7 billion individuals in their quest for identity as well as in their interactions ?
We can respond with optimism to referring to Gandhi who said " Start by changing in yourself, what you want to change around you " or to Beethoven who invited you to make your bell tower sing to enchant the world...
We can also be more doubtful by placing ourselves on the side of theories of the common good (including that of Elinor Ostrom, the only woman to have received a Nobel Prize in economics to date) which defeat the idea that the sum of individual interests make up the general interest: since there is no " invisible hand" to put individual interests in tune (even if it means disappointing Adam Smith's supporters), There is no guarantee that 7 billion human beings, more balanced, clearer with their aspirations, better anchored in their individual values, will be able to take up collective challenges as ambitious as the fight against climate change, peace in the world or the eradication of extreme poverty...
" Hummingbirds " facing global inflammation?
Indeed, the criticism that can be made of personal development is the same as that addressed to " micro-change ", by describing in particular the succession of initiatives of modest magnitude as " harmless marginalities". Do we really transform the world by sowing small pebbles, do we dam overflowing rivers by diverting water to small streams, do we extinguish expansive fires by accumulating drops of water brought by " hummingbirds " of good will ?
The reference to the fable popularized by Pierre Rabhi , which encourages everyone to " do their part ", also allows us to report criticism of it: at the end of an assiduous work of investigation on the ideological foundations as well as on the effects on mentalities of Rabhi's theories, the journalist Jean-Baptiste Malet denounces " a form of non-political ecology, spiritualist and individualist ".
By " non-political ecology", we must understand that behind the promise made to everyone to be able to " do their part " on their own, via isolated actions, there is a risk of denial of the need to work together behind a global project for society. By pointing the finger at the " spiritualism " of the Colibris movement, Malet points to possible reactionary excesses, as proof of which he cites the essentialist positions taken on gender or Rabhi's fierce opposition to homosexual union, which he considers " dangerous for the future of humanity ".
But it is above all " individualism " that could induce the method that we must be concerned with : by selecting what he is willing to " do his part " for and therefore to develop the " soft skills " useful for actions that correspond to his personal values, does the individual not manifest a form of selfishness in his (good) desire to contribute to a better world of life ? To what extent is he willing to renounce his own interests for the benefit of the common good? And don't these individuals, satisfied with their own development, risk being somehow " lulled " by their own sense of well-being when we should also think about the power relations and systemic inequalities that leave others in less comfort, or even outright suffering?
For a dynamic interaction between personal development and psycho-sociology
A non-binary response to this concern to see individual action supplant collective action is perhaps to be found in the alliance of personal development with psycho-sociology. This discipline, which studies the interactions between individuals and the socio-cultural framework in which they evolve, brings together the transformation of people and that of organizations : it invites influencers, leaders and other role models to a form of exemplarity in their daily practice of the paths of change : limitation of decision-making biases, Inclusive management, work-life balance, humility...
Guarantors of the establishment and maintenance of an environment conducive to the deployment of the best of oneself by all, they are actors in the personal development of each one as well as in the quality of the ecosystem in which everyone evolves. The portrait of the manager of the future, trained in soft skills and aware of his or her responsibilities in the transformation process that shakes everyone up but can also offer a thousand and one exciting opportunities to everyone...
