Introduction
The image of the profession as a cognitive and emotional education significantly changes the system of general guidelines in the public and individual consciousness of people. Professional development becomes inseparable from personal development – both are based on the principle of self-development, which determines the ability of a person to transform one’s life into creative self-fulfillment. Moreover, personal development approach allows understanding the object and conditions, the mechanism and driving forces, the genesis and dynamics of professional development of the individual (Avlaev, 2020). Academic development is seen as a third integral part of the development process. The reason is that through extending one’s outlook and deepening one’s knowledge about a number of subjects a person learns to adopt certain personal and professional values. These values ultimately determine the choice of personal as well as professional path. This work looks upon the formation of my personal, academic, and professional development and outlines the areas of development where I made more progress.
Professional Development
In professional development, the area where I feel I made real progress is negotiation skills. Indeed, the ability to communicate is one of the most important skills in the labour market. It is necessary for mutual understanding in the team, so employers pay special attention to it. Kotsou et al. (2019) state that the way that people’s success or failure in communication as well as, more broadly, fulfilling their potential and building a successful career, depend on the emotional intelligence they develop. This course that has dwelt on this issue has been of a particular interest to me since I have tended to disregard this side of communicative skills. This has led to all kinds of trouble in my studies and personal life. I learnt that empathy, ability to show kindness and understanding can be much more important than intelligence in building successful negotiations and ultimately getting one’s heart’s wishes (McGuire, & Drost, 2022). A good illustration of how empathy can be more important than knowledge is the event in my personal life when I tried to explain math to my younger sister. When I was clever and showed how to solve all kinds of equations she did not understand it. However, when I sympathized with her explaining the material in a simplified way, she quickly grasped what I wanted her to do and managed perfectly well. Thus, I learned that building professional communications with sympathy, understanding and kindness as well as around mutual professional goals can be a way to success.
Personal Development
Personal development is the process of continuous positive changes of an individual. It helps to correct character traits, get rid of complexes, negative thoughts, and learn to control emotions (Zafar, 2020). A person becomes stronger, managing his or her life without support from the outside. The area where I feel I made great progress in personal development is the ability to rely on my own resources in a difficult situation and ability for self-control. Indeed, the course taught me to believe in myself and where I used to rely on the opinion of my parents and friends, now I analyse their ideas and compare them to my own before acting this or that way. I found that I like to be in charge of my life and am ready to assume responsibility for my decisions no matter how erroneous they might be. As far as emotions are concerned, I used to fly into a temper if things went wrong or somebody acted stupidly when it was obvious to me what should have been done. The course taught me that unchecked emotions may ruin personal and professional relations and that personal development should become an integral part of one’s life if he or she wants to be successful. So now I try not to give way to negative emotions and I have found that my friends and relatives find it easier to communicate with me.
Academic Development
In academic development, the area where I made significant progress is learning to synthetize and analyze the material read or otherwise covered within the course. Synthesis is understood as a research method that consists in determining the relationships between different entities and combining various elements into a single whole (Gilmore et al., 2019). Synthesis is necessary to learn to combine theories and concepts into a single system and to link contradictory ideas into an integral system. Synthesis is also important for the formation of new scientific directions out of several disciplines. Analysis is a process that is the opposite of synthesis. This is a method of scientific research, when a complex object is divided into its component parts (Gilmore et al., 2019). Each part and the connections between them are being studied.
Synthesis is related to analysis since these are the main ways that play a fundamental role in scientific knowledge, two inseparable processes. The course helped me to establish links between different parts of my studies so that I feel that they crystallize into a single whole. On the other hand, now I can understand what parts each course consists of and how they correlate to each other. I hope the use of synthesis and analysis in my studies and work will help me become a well-prepared specialist who not only has bits of knowledge in different fields but also sees how these fields correlate and what interdependencies exist in different academic contexts.
Conclusion
Personal, professional, and academic development are interrelated processes that aim at helping a person to be successful in personal, academic, and work life. The main areas where I managed to make progress refer to negotiation skills, self-reliance and self-control, and analysis and synthesis skills. In negotiation skills, I managed to develop emotional intelligence that helps me to communicate more effectively with my family and colleagues. Self-reliance helps me to make judgement based on my ideas and assume responsibility for my decisions. Self- control assists me in keeping check on my emotions thus making communication easier. Analysis and synthesis skills help me to find correlation between different notions and unite them into a single whole or break into respective parts depending on the aim of the research.
Reference List
Avlaev, O.U., 2020. The role of social intelligence in personal development. JournalNX, pp.692-698. Web.
Gilmore, B., McAuliffe, E., Power, J. and Vallières, F., 2019. Data analysis and synthesis within a realist evaluation: toward more transparent methodological approaches. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 18, p.1609406919859754. Web.
Kotsou, I., Mikolajczak, M., Heeren, A., Grégoire, J. and Leys, C., 2019. Improving emotional intelligence: A systematic review of existing work and future challenges. Emotion Review, 11(2), pp.151-165. Web.
McGuire, S.J. and Drost, E.A., A Framework for Facilitating Acquisition and Improvement of Negotiation Skills by Business Students. Web.
Using Active Learning to Teach Critical and Contextual Studies: One Teaching Plan, Two Experiments, Three Videos. 8th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd’22). pp. 619-627.(p. 75). Web.
Zafar, N., 2020. Understanding the role of personal development in undergraduates. Pakistan Review of Social Sciences (PRSS), 1(1), pp.93-115. Web.