PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

Personal Development

Personal Development

The development of my personal values has come about through a variety of sources. One of the first influences was my close relationship with my grandmother, who was a Greek immigrant. She had a strong determination about the things she wanted to achieve and did not back down from anything just because it was difficult. Since we lived with her for the first four years of my life and my mother worked during those years, I became very close to her and acquired some of her inner drive. My grandmother also felt strongly about always doing the right thing, no matter what. I remember that one of her neighbors was taken to court in a case involving possible wrongdoing within his family, and many people had prejudged him before the trial. My grandmother, however, refused to testify to anything except what she had actually seen and heardùno hearsay, no conjecture, and no repeating of rumors. He was acquitted as a result of her testimony, and I have always felt that justice was done because of her fearless resolve to be honest.

School influenced me greatly, as well, especially my teachers. I loved school and wanted to please my teachers, and this prompted me to work hard to do well and stay out of trouble.

Values are beliefs that are experienced by the individual as standards that guide how he or she should function; they are cognitive structures, but they also have behavioral and affective dimensions. Values develop so that individuals can meet their needs in socially acceptable ways, and thus they are shaped by the cultural context of the individual. Individuals' values are the basis of their self-evaluation and their evaluation of others, and they play a major role in the establishment of personal goals. They may operate out of awareness or may be brought into awareness through a process of crystallization and prioritization (Brown, 1996). Values are crystallized when individuals can identify them and tell how the values influence their behavior. They are prioritized when individuals can rank order them in terms of their relative importance.

When I start to examine my personal values and think about how I developed them, I start to think about my childhood days. As I grew and developed, my mother would always share what she called little lessons of life that would help me through the years, from childhood to adulthood. These lessons involved values, such as trust, honesty, respect, integrity and the importance of family and to always to what was right in every situation. She would tell me how important these were and that I may not have understood them then, but as I grew older I would. Of course, she was right.

The values system contains all the values held by individuals, including their cultural values and work values.

ultural values have been identified through research as being those typically held by certain cultural groups (Carter, 1991). They include values regarding human nature (human beings are good, bad or neither), ...