An essential point for assessing the integrity and facilitating its development recognizes the similarities between integrity and emotional maturity. But how to develop a mature personality? If a person is truly emotionally mature, she is honest and acts with integrity. If a person has integrity, his attitudes and behaviors are emotionally mature.

Our emotional maturity and, therefore, our real power lies in the ability, the will, and the behavior to be totally responsible and accountable for our attitude as much as what we say and do. You can develop a mature personality if you become aware of the choices you make and the impact of those choices. It’s about understanding how we limit ourselves unnecessarily and how we can, by choice, confront and end those boundaries. It is about recognizing, accepting, and repossessing what we reject or reject about ourselves and our behavior.

In this sense, we see the connection between emotional maturity and personality.

Emotional maturity lies in an individual’s ability to be attentive to the full range of emotions possible since these emotions allow communication by providing the basis for differentiation and discernment of our impact. The inability of an individual to do this is a precise measure of his degree of emotional immaturity, regardless of social appearance. Thus immaturity will manifest itself through different forms and levels of defense, pretense, behavioral sabotage, limited choice, and sadness.

Developing a Mature Personality Is a Conscious Choice

While understanding emotional dynamics is a great help, it does not make us emotionally mature person. We are not emotionally mature because we reach a certain age, because we have finished school, because we have a job, because we are married, because we have children, because we earn a lot of money or because we have reached a certain social or political position.

Genes and hormones condition children and adolescents. However, after adolescence, we must consciously choose maturity. Emotional maturity is a conscious choice, the conscious choice to be responsible for our impact on others and the world. If we do not make this choice, we remain at the level of emotional immaturity of a teenager, and this is despite all the material “success” we can meet.

Being self-aware and self-important is a typical characteristic of children and adolescents. They expect to be cared for unconditionally, ask for special treatment and complain that life does not match their demands. This does not make them, however, “bad.” It’s part of the maturity process. However, these behaviors are not characteristic of emotional maturity. When these characteristics are recurrently manifest in a “big,” they are indications that this person didn’t develop a mature personality, that she is not a responsible adult, but rather someone who always reacts according to the behavioral patterns specific to an egocentric child or a teenager steeped in self-importance.

There are many people who give the impression of being “big,” who seem to be successful by current standards, but who are emotionally still children or teenagers. They never “grew up” emotionally, perhaps because they saw how their parents incorporated the notions of “adult” and “responsibility” and perceived them as burdens. If the only adult models they could see were reactive models, it is likely that they would adopt the same behavior or its equivalent. Regardless of the reason, these people are engaged in reactive and unthinking behavior and mistakenly consider maturity and responsibility as burdens to be avoided.

The therapists speak of the need to “let go of the past” and to interrupt the usual patterns that do not work. By interrupting these patterns of the past and breaking our chains, we are more available to “be present,” to discern, evaluate and choose the actions that grow and make us our power.

However, as any change generates fears, we do not want to give up our “good old” patterns, familiar and therefore relatively comfortable, even if they obviously ruin our lives. Then we continue to do what is usual (choose the devil we know rather than a devil we do not know), hoping that it will give somewhere a different result.

That is why changing, individually or in an organization, is so difficult and generates its own resistance even if the change is obviously and dramatically necessary.

Any change or transition from one stage to another always requires effort. It is in this sense that many refuse to choose to be mature.

To Be Mature Is to Be in the Present

To truly develop a mature personality, to become emotionally mature, is to be in the PRESENT, to let go of the past, to respond and not to react to what is. Clinging to the past becomes a convenient way of blaming parents, others, and life situations for our relationship problems and difficulties. We use them to avoid confronting and being responsible for our immature and irresponsible behaviors. Instead of being attentive to what is, we react to what has been and are, therefore, less able to manage what is appropriate.

Our parents were probably not exemplary, and they had a definite impact on us. Some of these impacts are far from ideal. Others could be very painful and destructive. But it was before, and today is NOW! We must honestly ask ourselves, “Who is recreating the problem TODAY?”

This is something that people do not know. It is that having a strong personality is also having a strong maturity. There is no solid build of personality without maturity. In this sense, emotional maturity and personality go hand in hand.

Maturity Is Not to Be Affected Especially Negatively by Our Past

A fundamental part of the journey from adolescence to adult maturity is to stop blaming others for our troubles. To blame is to keep unresolved grievances of the past. We need to learn to forgive ourselves as much as to forgive others before taking charge of our lives in the present. Once adolescence is over, we can choose to be emotionally mature with all the power and freedom that maturity gives.

How to Develop a Mature Personality?

The ripening process is the opposite of the deterioration process […]. It is about advancing our will to face our fears and take responsibility for our past and present behaviors. It is also taking possession of the forces, gifts, and talents inherent in us and acting on them.

Paradoxically it is on what we reject that we fix our attention. When we want to look and take responsibility for what we have always denied, our attention is relaxed, and we feel lighter and more open. We can then see and measure our full potential, move from our dark side to our potential, and use those qualities and attitudes to counterbalance this blind spot so far.

The desire to feel and express one’s emotions strengthens an individual’s emotional and personal base. The stronger this personal emotional base, the greater the presence of this person who becomes more and more able to react positively to any situation. And that goes in the direction of his personality.

From Blame to Responsibility: The Key to Power and Empowerment

We are responsible for our actions. Others are responsible for their actions. The more we recognize and take responsibility for our actions, the more we allow ourselves things. If we are willing to use our fears to look deep within ourselves and take responsibility for our impact, we open the door to welcome more awareness, growth, and empowerment.

An important key is to look for what we blame and how we do it. The things we do not like about others are often indicators of what we need to look at within ourselves. If we are willing to do so, we can use what we reproach ourselves in others as a mirror to help us identify certain aspects of ourselves that we have refused to recognize or have not recognized.

It may be true that we have been unfairly treated in a given situation. However, too often, we use the irresponsible behavior of a third person as a distraction and a justification for not looking at our share of responsibility in this particular situation or any other for that matter. An overreaction to the behavior of a third person is often an attempt to deny, for ourselves and for others, our contribution to this unacceptable behavior. To blame is to use the irresponsibility of others to deny those aspects of ourselves whose responsibility we have not yet accepted.

We must recognize and accept our contribution to the situation: no more, no less. To refuse it, whether strong or weak, negative or positive, is to lose some of our power. It is in our desire to observe, confront, to accept our responsibility that lies the opportunities to grow and mature.

In short, the more we adopt an attitude of responsibility, the more we build and develop a mature personality. Learning to be responsible and to take one’s actions leads to a foundation of our maturity.

If we are hurt and say, “He did this or did not do that, what a wicked person!”, We must ask ourselves if we have not been so, one day, in this position, in a way or another. For example, if we are disappointed with a person who has not kept his promises, this is an opportunity we must take to see if we have not, one day, failed in our promise. This is often what we recognize as our own irresponsibility.

It may be true that this other person has been irresponsible and has not kept his promise, which may be worth handling. Still, the opportunity and the important aspect is to recognize and accept the impact of our own behavior.

When we choose to pay attention, not to how this other person has saddened us (placing the responsibility out on us), but rather to what we have done similar and denied (placing responsibility on ourselves), three things happen immediately:

* We are less upset (our attention has shifted from blame to responsibility).

* We have positive control over the situation; we have directed our attention and intentions to what we can control (ourselves) rather than what we can hardly control (the other person).

* We feel lighter and more empowered (the inevitable result is when we accept responsibility for our actions).

Looking inward is not only an opportunity to see some of the impacts we have not taken responsibility for, but it is also an opportunity to recognize the pattern in which we are used to evolving. Once the schema is recognized and accepted, we are then able to abandon the victim status for that of a responsible person and thus expand the scope of our options to change constructively.

In summary on How to Develop a Mature Personality

You cannot reach maturity while spending your time blaming others. You must know that we do not wake up one morning, and here we are, mature. No! Becoming mature or just forging one’s character takes time and effort together. Have a constant look at your behavior and seek to understand others, understand them, and accept them as they are. This is the path of maturity. This is how you will develop a mature personality.