In the 50s of the last century in the USA, and then in Western Europe, special forms of psychotherapeutic work began to emerge and quickly develop: “training or T-groups.” They brought together people who were mentally healthy, but had psychological problems: it was difficult for them to understand themselves, regulate their own emotions and behavior, they lost their sense of meaning and interest in life, had difficulty communicating with other people, felt lonely, etc. The trainer-psychologist tried to influence his clients not only directly, but also through other members of the group. Many felt better just from the realization that not only they, but also others were experiencing similar difficulties. In the group, each person was guaranteed support and confidentiality of everything that was said during the meetings, so people could, in conditions of relative psychological safety, talk about their problems and difficulties, relive difficult situations without hiding their emotions, hear the opinions of other people, try out new forms behavior in game models of life situations. Currently, the concept of “training” is used very widely. This is the name given to an intensive training course that combines short theoretical seminars and practical skills training in a short period of time. Psychological training concerns, of course, psychological skills: self-regulation, personality development, communication, including professional skills. Personal growth trainings are closest to psychotherapeutic groups. In them, participants try to understand and overcome their psychological problems that interfere with the solution of life and professional tasks (understand their unconscious fears, get rid of internal barriers, find out how people around them perceive them, effectively apply their positive qualities, form a real assessment of their abilities, see their own errors and shortcomings, etc.). The field of personal growth, personal and spiritual development represents a very wide and varied range of different individual and group practices. Definitions of personal growth and development are also varied and determined by conceptual frameworks and subjective preferences of both group leaders and participants. It is significant that psychologically well-off people who feel the need for self-knowledge and self-development turn to developmental and personal growth trainings. Occult, esoteric, spiritual practices may also be included here if the psychological component prevails in them. Many trainings are personal development trainings. Although these kinds of methods can also be used in psychotherapy and psychological counseling. There are a huge number of different personal growth trainings that have different conceptual foundations and technologies. Development is always associated with a qualitative change in personality, abilities, functions, and skills. There are technologies aimed at the formation of certain new skills and abilities (for example, the theory of the gradual formation of mental actions by P.Ya. Galperin, training in communication, sensitivity, creativity), technologies aimed at the general development of the individual (holonomic integration by S. Grof, integrative trainings by V. V. Kozlova, psychosynthesis by R. Assagioli, yoga practices, etc.). In personal growth trainings, the leading concept is the idea of ​​an ideal, perfect personality, which also differs in different psychological schools. The training itself is organized as a process of implementation and achievement of this perfection. In a weaker interpretation of personality development, we can talk about the development and improvement of individual qualities and abilities of the individual. What is personality? According to the psychological dictionary: “Personality – 1. An individual person as an individual, as a subject of relationships and conscious activity, in the process of which he creates, reproduces and changes social reality. 2. Relatively stablea system of socially significant and unique individual traits that characterize an individual, which is formed in the process of socialization and is a product of individual experience and social interaction.” Personality is formed on the basis of innate biological prerequisites and social experience acquired during life, as well as active objective activity. Personality is relatively stable, but at the same time, it changes as a result of adaptation to a constantly changing environment. Four levels can be distinguished in the personality structure (D.A. Leontiev): 1. biological basis, which includes age, gender properties of the psyche, innate properties of the nervous system and temperament. This level is almost impossible to conscious self-regulation and training.2. individual characteristics of human psychological processes (memory, thinking, emotions, abilities). This level depends both on congenital factors and on experience, training, and development of these qualities.3. individual social experience, which includes the knowledge, skills, abilities and habits acquired by a person. They are social in nature, formed in the process of communication, joint activity, learning and can be changed with the help of training.4. The highest level of personality consists of its value orientations. The simplest definition of value orientations is ideal ideas about what is good. These are the grounds for a subjective assessment of reality, a way of dividing objects according to their subjective significance. Value orientations (intentional foundations) determine a person’s general approach to the world and himself, and give meaning and direction to the individual’s social position. Intentional foundations influence a stable system of drives, desires, interests, inclinations, ideals and views, as well as a person’s beliefs, his worldview, self-esteem and character traits. They are formed on the basis of a person’s entire life experience, but are only partially realized. Their targeted correction is possible as a result of training and entails a restructuring of the entire personality. But in ordinary consciousness, the personality is not interested in its origin, at every given moment proceeding from itself as the final authority that generates a socially ordered fabric of life. This life weakly reflects not only on its source, but its entire process essentially proceeds unconsciously, automatically, like a dream in which the subject is not aware that it is he who is now performing the entire process of life and that at any moment he can exit from the game and give birth to a new reality with a new process of life or step back and observe it. In fact, habitual social stimuli give rise to habitual reactions: sensations, feelings, thoughts, actions - and habitual inclusion, inseparability, “pasting” into them. Personal growth lies in the constant, steady development of one’s personal potential. Personal potential is a generalized, systemic characteristic of individual psychological characteristics of a person, underlying the ability of an individual to proceed from stable internal criteria and guidelines in his life and maintain stability of activity and semantic orientations under external pressure and in changing conditions (D.A. Leontyev) . In other words, this is a complex of psychological properties that gives a person the opportunity to make decisions and regulate his behavior, taking into account and assessing the situation, but based primarily on his internal criteria and ideas. Starting from the concept of “personality”, “personal potential”, we can define the range of issues that personal growth training deals with, structuring them into three blocks: Reflective block - aimed at awareness, self-knowledge, turning the personality towards oneself, one’s origin. It proposes to consider three components: self-esteem, a person’s aspirations and self-image (self-concept), i.e. a person's ideas about himself. Any judgment of an individual is refracted through his “I-concept”, according to one of the tasks of personal traininggrowth will be the formation of an adequate “I-image”, self-esteem and reflection of claims. “I-image” is a subjective phenomenon; it develops as a reflection of social assessments, comparison of oneself and the results of one’s actions with other people and the results of their actions. Most often, the “I-image” combines three stages: the present I, the desired I and the imagined I, and if their discrepancy with each other is too deep and is not accepted by the person himself, this gives rise to an incomplete, scattered personality that always plays one or the other. a different role for society and for oneself. This structure can hide a zone of conflicts and internal contradictions of the individual, because the inability to be oneself gives rise to suffering in a person. In personal growth training, we can assess the inconsistency of the individual and build a conscious self-image based on our own choice. Intentional foundations (personal potential) - in this block, based on the opportunity for reflection already recorded in the first block, we work with the internal attitudes of the individual and his value orientations, which are usually at the level of the unconscious and, accordingly, cannot be realized, and therefore cannot be changed. We can only change anything consciously. Here begins the understanding of internal attitudes (mostly parental), the construction of an “inner core”, value and semantic orientations that are controlled by the person himself. Life strategies are a life program, a “scenario” about happiness, a system of values ​​and goals, the implementation of which allows you to achieve a person's life is the most successful in his mind. Very often our life strategies are inspired to us from the outside, i.e. sometimes we have to become a successful lawyer to realize dad’s unfulfilled dream, or marry a prince for mom, or repeat the family tradition of teachers and go to study at a pedagogical university. Then we can talk about the presence of an unconscious life scenario in the individual’s strategy, a scenario where the opinion of the person himself is not taken into account, plans are enshrined in the subconscious, are not questioned and are assessed as the only possible path to happiness. There are no options and no choice. After completing the first two stages of personal growth training, based on the ability to reflect and his own value system, a person can “dive” into the unconscious script and understand whether this is really what he wanted to achieve in life, and how his life script fits with his system of values. There is a choice here. And as the final stage - goal setting, a person’s orientation towards the future, the discovery of new opportunities, expansion of consciousness and a set of life options, no longer based on prejudices and stereotypes, but on a person’s personal potential. The individual is the bearer of society. The world is represented in the individual, and through her diverse activities she constantly reproduces it and generates new meanings and social realities. Based on the thesis “world-personality,” personal growth trainings can be divided into two types. Trainings of the first type work with personality problems or develop personality without discovering anything fundamentally new. Their main task is to help the individual return to a certain sufficient level of social adaptability, to a socially acceptable norm of functioning in society, or to form and develop, strengthen previously known qualities of the individual. There are a lot of manipulative techniques aimed at solving any problems. The main criterion for classifying training as this type is that it takes the world with its conditional values ​​as a starting point, which in the eyes of ordinary consciousness can have absolute meaning, but meanings that have an existential load are completely ignored or transferred to the plane of socially acceptable values. Personal growth training of the second type examines and resolves the issue of the origin of personality, its extra-social sources. This is the field of transpersonal research. Although personality as such.