 It is part of human nature to want to develop ourselves and live the best life possible. I mean, nobody gets up in the morning and they think that today I'm looking forward to having a very bad day. We all want to be happy and we are wired to be happy. So self-development is going to be a topic of discussion today. It's all about looking at the qualities, the skills, the traits and the talents that we have and making sure that we capitalize on our strengths very much and in such a way that our weaknesses disappear. Good evening and thank you so much for tuning in to Y254. My name is Elisabeth Nguena and this is a Health and Lifestyle Wednesday. So with me in the studio, I'm not alone, I have two guests. Close to me is Angela Katua, who is a transformational coach. Next to her is Yvonne Yamala, who is a vice chairperson at Karatina University. They are the people who are going to help me steer this discussion. Also, don't forget to follow this conversation on our social media pages at Y254, at Y254Channel and at Lizzy underscore Nguena, that is on Twitter. So, Angela and Yvonne, welcome to the show and thank you for coming. And without much further ado, let's just go straight to it. What is personal development and how can we achieve it? Personal development is a lifelong process of discovering your strengths and your weaknesses and working towards achieving your self-actualization. So it is basically knowing who you are and working towards the best of you that you can be. When we talk about self-development, I understand there are things we can't talk about without being involved. There are elements and themes, something like self-worth, self-identity, self-love, self-esteem, confidence, validation, all that. So I would want you to shine a light on first self-identity and self-worth. Self-identity is discovering who you truly are, why you are created because we were all brought to this earth for a reason and God had a purpose for everyone here. So you need to discover who you are and you look at what your past has been like from your childhood and now that is what makes you and then you know whether you are at the right place and whether you need to change some things about you. Many times we feel that we are not content with what is happening around us and basically that is what happiness is all about. If you are okay with whatever is happening in your life and if you are not okay with whatever is happening in your life then that now calls for you to discover who you are and now work towards what you are supposed to be doing and what you are supposed to be doing is your purpose. So self-awareness brings about your purpose. It helps you now propel yourself to achieving whatever it is that you are created to achieve. I wanted you first to define self-worth, self-identity and how they are related. Self-worth is your value and your space. Everyone has a space that they occupy and everyone has a value. So your self-worth will depend on how you take yourself and how you take yourself will depend on how you know yourself which is self-awareness. So there is self-awareness which is knowing who you are, your identity, who are you and then there is self-worth which is now self-worth is claiming your space knowing what your value is as a person because you see that there are people who have similar careers but some are paid very low and others paid very high and maybe others, the ones who are paid even a bit low are content. They are okay with whatever they are. Now they know that that is okay with them. That's their self-worth is just about that. So your self-worth is basically what you feel about yourself? Yeah. What value do you put in yourself? You put to yourself. So let me have Yvonne tell us a bit about confidence and self-esteem. Yvonne you are my last name and confidence and self-esteem I think this is something that I really love talking about because confidence is the way you take yourself. How are you going to present yourself to people? You see sometimes you just need to get the sense out of yourself and you need to have the courage in you. So confidence, when you have confidence like you're in a position to speak out what you know is right and what you know is wrong and now that based on the fact that we're talking about personal development you need to realize yourself. And I cannot say personal development is I can describe it in one major line of direction. I can describe it in five major, five different ways of which can I go ahead? Well, you can mention them. Okay, in terms of personal development you need to understand about your relational goals, your health goals, your financial goals, your career goals and your mental goals. That basically describes your personal development. So if you develop in the five major ways it will actually define who you are in terms of personal development. Okay, I imagine there are people who when growing up they miss that major step about developing yourself or maybe you missed a step and you were drawn maybe to assuming someone else's personality or character. Like basically you do not have the required self-love. So starting with Angela, can you tell us a bit about what effect that can have on you if you do not first understand yourself or you don't know your identity? What danger can it pose? Well, it is a requirement for everyone to know themselves and to develop themselves. And it's very unfortunate that many people actually are working around not knowing who they are and even going into relationships and going to employment and all that without discovering who truly they are. And the systems that we've been having before are systems that have not helped us discover ourselves at a younger age, which shouldn't be the case. And that is why we have so many broken marriages. We have people losing jobs that get fired because of emotional issues. We have people don't even know how to communicate, how to cope, how to dress up and present themselves. So it is a sad thing that people may not even know who they are and develop themselves without, and they are already grown up. Yes, now is there a specific age or a certain age that it may be, well, is there a certain age that will really affect you when you do not know yourself or it's just generally to everybody? It's generally to everybody because we need to teach even our children about personal development. We need to start from the basics. Even when they are very small before going to school, people need to understand what this thing is because it is very vital, it's very important. And you find that so many people are broken because, and I say that self-actualization is now achieving everything that you need and living happily. It may not be very easy for so many people to achieve because they never grew up knowing how to develop themselves. So this about self for themselves development, it's something that you grow learning, you learn developing as you grow up. So it starts from childhood onwards as you grow? Yes, it's supposed to be something that is advancing as you grow. It's not something that you learn and that's it. You have to keep on improving yourself because times change and people change, people even that you are relating with change and even yourself will change and you need to know how to work on yourself and how to adapt to all environments. So Yvonne, tell us a bit about, I assume you have seen people who are short of confidence and self-esteem. How do you think it affects them or how does it affect them? Actually that is a major problem because you might find someone as she's just pointed that you find like, when you don't have confidence you're not in a position to speak out. When you're not in a position to speak out, nobody will know what it is in you. So it has adverse effects to individuals. So when you don't have confidence, first of all you haven't understood yourself. You need to understand yourself from beginning. Of which if you don't understand yourself, there is no way you can speak out. You can't tell people that this is what it is. Exactly, you cannot express yourself such that when you have a problem, I'm not in a position to detect. Even when you go where people are, when you have not understood yourself, sometimes you might find you are having a problem but you can't speak it out. So I'm not in a position to detect if you are in need of help or you're okay. So it usually has some negative effects to people such that people are not in a position to know how they can help you. And since you don't have the confidence and the courage, first you didn't understand yourself. So you're not in a position to speak about what it is in you. So the relationships that you're having with people, you'll have a lot of difficulties in terms of relating with the people and coping up with the life. Generally life challenges will beat you up and therefore you will not succeed in what you really want. I can imagine it's such a big getaway to things like depression and mental health issues. So I have grown up, I have found myself in my 20s and I have realized that maybe I do not know where I stand in terms of self-worth, self-love and self-esteem. Where do I start? Let's start with Angela, where do I start? Now, I mean my 20s, I already have friends, I already have my life put together but I don't have self-worth and all these things I need to figure out about myself, where do I start? You have to be deliberate with whatever it is that you want to achieve and if personal development is something that you really want to achieve you have to take the initiative to learn about it because one thing about achieving is you learn fast. So you have to learn yourself, you have to learn what makes you happy, what makes you sad. It is unfortunate that because now personal development is about an all-rounded person from your spirituality, your spirituality, your financial your work and everything else about life and it's unfortunate that many people go into relationships and even marriage and they feel that they want to get someone who they know but they don't even know who they are so it's an initiative that these people everyone needs to take. If you are a grown person and you haven't really achieved it there is no limit of time that you need to start. I once started a class of personal development and I had a student who was 60 years old and he was he learned a lot and it even pushed him further into achieving things that he never thought that he could achieve. At 60, yeah. Well so how do you understand your identity? That is what you're going to look at when we come back after the break so don't go too far. Let's take that break.