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Part One Personal Development
The future holds many opportunities for you. It can also present
some difficulties. As you enter adulthood, you will want to try to
overcome the difficulties and seize the opportunities. This can be a
challenge. How you meet this challenge depends, in part, on how you
feel about yourself.
You have been expressing yourself through your actions since you
were born. You influence others you meet, and they, in turn, influence you.
This “connectedness” with others is one of the basic fundamentals of life.
You are a unique individual, but you function within a family, a
community, and a society. There are boundaries within which you must
function, but you have freedom within these boundaries. As you grow
and mature, you will learn to recognize the balance between rights and
responsibilities this freedom requires.
Your Personality
In order to understand yourself and others, you need to understand
the factors that help shape your personality. Personality is defi ned
as the group of behavioral and emotional traits that distinguishes
an individual. It is all that you have been, are now, and hope to be.
Personality can also be defi ned as the sum of all the traits that you have
inherited (been born with) or acquired (learned).
This book will help you explore the factors that shape your
personality. Once you are familiar with the various aspects of your
personality, you will be better able to answer important questions such
as “Who am I?” and “How do I deal with who I am?” You will learn to
recognize the many possibilities that can be a part of your life.
Factors That Shape Personality
Almost everything you do is guided and affected by the
relationships within your family, 1-1. Family may be defi ned in many
ways. Some defi nitions emphasize an emotional tie, while others stress
the ancestry of the individuals. According to the U.S. Census Bureau,
the term family means a group of two or more people, related by blood,
marriage, or adoption, who reside together in a household.
Heredity, the sum of the traits that are passed from your ancestors
to you, has a great effect on your personality. Because you are a human
being, you have many traits in common with other people. You have
two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth, two arms, and two legs. These are
human traits determined by heredity and are called inherited traits.
Heredity also causes differences among people. The color of eyes, the
shape of ears, and the length of arms vary from person to person. How
many of your classmates have black hair? How many have blue eyes?