What personal issue troubles you the most? Are you too uptight or easily stressed? Do you work too hard? Do you struggle with an addictive personality? Are you compulsive about details, or do you forget them too easily? Building a personal development plan will help you to improve those aspects of your personality that you want to change.

Personal development is the process by which people become more aware of their own strengths and weaknesses. They seek to solve problems and improve interpersonal relationships by capitalizing their strengths and minimizing their weaknesses. Before an individual can successfully accomplish this, however, he or she must take a serious look at problematic aspects of their personality and determine how to change them.

Creating a formal personal development plan requires honesty, perseverance, and hard work. First, evaluate your strengths and weaknesses as honestly and openly as possible. Then, decide which of these you are willing to work hard to change. Making these difficult decisions is a part of personal values development. Next, you must be willing to work to change those aspects of yourself that are least congruent with your own personal values.

Building a personal development plan often requires input from another, trusted person in your life. Find someone who knows you better than anyone else, and ask that person to offer his or her perception of your strengths and weaknesses. Explain your interest in self improvement, and ask this person to help you in your quest for personal development.

Many self help books offer personal development tips that are extremely general. While these can sometimes be of use, they aren't always very helpful in specific situations. Furthermore, it is almost impossible to construct a formal personal development plan without interaction and feedback from a trusted professional.

Other traditionally used techniques for self improvement include behavior therapy and support groups. Although these can be helpful, they can only assist people to focus on those aspects of negative attitudes and behaviors of which they are aware. These approaches focus on the symptoms, rather than the actual root, of the problem.

A newer, more effective way to help people deal with personality issues and capitalize on their strengths is personal development hypnosis. Hypnotherapists can use this treatment to assist clients to develop a formal personal development plan. These professionals help people to objectively identify their weaknesses and to focus on creative, effective ways to work toward self improvement.

Often, people who are critical thinkers or resistant to directional suggestions find the traditional forms of self help hypnosis to be less effective than people who are very suggestible do. For these critical thinking individuals, Ericksonian methods of personal development hypnosis, as well as Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), are much more effective. These methods are very successful in helping analytical people work toward self improvement.

People who struggle with stress in their lives often benefit greatly from self help hypnosis. During the therapy session, either through regression or simply the increased recall that is possible through hypnosis, the client may be able to explain some causes of stress that are subconscious and pervasive. After learning about the causes of the client's stress, a professional hypnotherapist can then offer personal development direction that will help the client to eliminate stress from his or her life. Often, simply becoming aware of the causes is enough to motivate and encourage many people to work toward resolving these issues.

Individuals who struggle with addictions to food or tobacco often benefit from Ericksonian or conventional traditional types of self help hypnosis as well. Through hypnotic suggestion, they become less psychologically dependent on food or cigarettes to deliver feelings of peace and tranquility. Furthermore, hypnotherapy practitioners can help clients conquer the unconscious associations between food, cigarette smoking, or tobacco chewing and pleasurable activities such as reading or watching television.

Developing a successful personal development plan may take the help of a detached third-party professional. The challenge is to be able to honestly identify one's strengths, and to use these strengths to overcome undesirable weaknesses. Many people have difficulty even admitting their weaknesses to themselves; they struggle even more with discussing these weaknesses openly in behavioral or group therapy.

Self help hypnosis is an ideal tool for helping people to address these problems at the unconscious level, where they originate. Professionals who practice this approach can also help clients by offering direct or indirect suggestions for helping them in their quest for personal development.

Summary: Most people have some aspect of their personality or behavior that they would like to change. Conventional self improvement books and behavioral therapies that try to help people form a personal development plan are limited by their inability to address the problem behaviors in the unconscious mind, where the problems originate. Personal development hypnosis that uses either traditional or Ericksonian methods is an ideal therapy for helping clients to overcome their weaknesses by focusing on the root, rather than the symptoms, of the problem.

Since many people are reluctant to admit their shortcomings to others, or they lack the necessary funds to afford the help of a therapist, quite often hypnosis recordings made by a competent hypnotherapist who is proficient at Ericksonian Hypnosis and NLP can be very successful.

A list of the common uses of hypnosis.

Alan B. Densky, CH has helped to guide the self development efforts of clients since 1978. He specializes in stress related symptoms and addictions, and offers a comprehensive list of self help hypnosis titles on his Neuro-VISION® self-hypnosis for self-development website.