Imagine two people joining the same community project. One hopes to encounter lives different from their own and reconsider assumptions they have carried for years. The other hopes to form friendships and contribute to a place that matters to them. Both want to grow. Yet the changes they hope for are different, even as they work side by side.

The distinction gives us a more precise way to consider our aspirations. When we say that we want to become a better person, what are we hoping will change? We may want to understand our lives more adequately. We may want to participate in them more fully. Research on growth goals suggests that these aims can relate to different developmental outcomes, leaving room for both within a meaningful life.

Two Orientations Toward Personal Growth

Personal growth can mean learning to recognize our motives, developing a valued ability, or becoming more available to people we care about. Each possibility involves development, but each asks something different of us. Treating growth as a single improvement can obscure the particular change we hope to make.

Jack J. Bauer and Dan P. McAdams (2010) approached this problem by examining people’s accounts of their major life goals. Their interest extended beyond the visible goal, such as completing an education or establishing a career. They examined the reasons that made it personally important. A career goal could express a desire to explore ideas, develop meaningful skills, help others, or achieve status. The activity alone would not reveal its purpose.

This attention to purpose connects goals with narrative identity, the evolving account through which we understand our lives. A goal places a possible future within that account. Wanting to learn how we became distrustful and wanting to build a more trusting friendship both concern who we might become, while emphasizing different kinds of change (Bauer & McAdams, 2010).

Understanding More Through Learning and Reflection

Intellectual-growth goals emphasize developing understanding. They can involve exploring unfamiliar perspectives, questioning a familiar explanation, and learning about the self or other people. The word intellectual can sound narrowly academic. Here, the concern includes the ordinary work of making better sense of a complicated life (Bauer & McAdams, 2010).

At the community project, a volunteer might assume that a quiet neighbor is uninterested. An intellectual-growth aim could involve learning how the neighbor sees the project and reconsidering that first judgment. Perhaps the proposed meeting time excludes people with care responsibilities. This hypothetical example illustrates understanding that changes when another perspective enters the picture.

Bauer and McAdams studied this kind of change through a measure called ego development. Here, growth means being able to see more of a situation and bring its different parts together. We may recognize that someone has mixed motives, or that two people can understand the same event differently. The measure examines how people make sense of themselves and the social world. It does not measure a person’s worth, intelligence, or wisdom (Bauer & McAdams, 2010).

Learning more facts about personality would not, by itself, demonstrate this development. The relevant aspiration is to let understanding become more adequate to experience. The volunteer might come to recognize that commitment can take forms the project has overlooked, while still considering what the work requires.

Living More Deeply Through Meaningful Participation

Socioemotional-growth goals emphasize enriching the experience of life. They include deepening relationships, strengthening personally meaningful abilities, and developing the capacity to contribute. The emphasis falls on how we experience and participate in what matters to us (Bauer & McAdams, 2010).

In The Good Life, Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz bring this aim into the texture of ordinary relationships. They distinguish making time for people from being mentally present during that time. We may care about a relationship while repeatedly leaving time together to an imagined, less demanding future. Their account invites us to examine what receives our attention now, alongside what we say matters to us (Waldinger & Schulz, 2023, pp. 118–121).

Waldinger and Schulz illustrate attentive participation through the story of Leo DeMarco, a busy teacher. His work mattered to him, while his family sometimes wondered whether it mattered more than they did. Their account also describes trips, walks, and everyday exchanges through which he gave family members his attention (Waldinger & Schulz, 2023, pp. 124–125). Contribution and close relationships can both be meaningful, yet they can compete for our availability. These life histories enrich the picture of participation; they do not test whether a growth goal caused later well-being.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Finding Flow offers a related perspective on such involvement. He describes experiences in which attention becomes absorbed in an activity, with clear goals, useful feedback, and challenges that engage a person’s abilities. Making music, working, and sharing an absorbing conversation can all provide occasions for this quality of attention (Csikszentmihalyi, 1998). Flow describes an experience; socioemotional growth describes a broader developmental aim. Their connection helps explain why the quality of participation deserves attention alongside achievement.

Contribution widens this path beyond personal enjoyment. We may want to become more dependable as a mentor, develop the ability to care fairly, or help sustain something that others will inherit. The growth-goal framework includes these concerns for other people’s development and future generations. Contribution need not become a demand for constant usefulness; its meaning depends partly on what we can freely and sustainably offer (Bauer & McAdams, 2010; Ryan et al., 2008).

Either orientation can concern our own development or the development of others and our relationships. Bauer and McAdams distinguish this emphasis alongside the intellectual and socioemotional distinction. The examples below illustrate that combination; they are not quotations or additional research findings (Bauer & McAdams, 2010).

These are overlapping dimensions of goals, not fixed types of people. Understanding can develop through close interaction, and meaningful participation can include a solitary pursuit. A single commitment may occupy more than one part of the comparison.

What Research on Personal Growth Goals Found

Bauer and McAdams (2010) followed college freshmen and seniors at Northwestern University. Of 145 original participants, 87 provided follow-up data on the primary measures approximately three and a half years later. At the beginning, participants described two major life goals. Researchers coded those accounts for intellectual and socioemotional growth themes.

Participants whose goals emphasized understanding tended to show greater gains in ego development. Those whose goals emphasized richer experiences and relationships tended to show greater gains in subjective well-being. In each case, the researchers took participants’ starting scores into account. Their well-being measure combined satisfaction with life and pleasant and unpleasant feelings. It described more than a passing good mood, and the pattern remained when broad personality traits were considered (Bauer & McAdams, 2010).

The pattern was especially evident for intellectual goals concerned with one’s own development and socioemotional goals concerned with relationships and others. These findings identify differences in emphasis. They do not establish that understanding is an exclusively private pursuit or that meaningful experience always requires company. The framework allows either orientation to concern oneself, other people, or both (Bauer & McAdams, 2010).

The study also leaves important limits. Participants came from a selective university, most were women, and only 60 percent of the original sample supplied the primary follow-up data. The researchers observed goals and development rather than assigning people to pursue particular aims. They did not establish that choosing a growth goal caused change, or trace whether participants achieved the goals they described. Across the sample, subjective well-being did not increase significantly on average (Bauer & McAdams, 2010).

Later work gave these motives the names reflective growth motivation, for wanting to understand more, and experiential growth motivation, for wanting richer experience. Across five studies, the two motives showed different links with maturity and well-being. These studies compared people at one point in time. They help clarify the distinction, but cannot show whether either motive was followed by development (Bauer et al., 2015).

Why Different Growth Goals May Relate to Different Outcomes

Learning Invites Us to Reconsider Our Interpretations

One plausible explanation begins with the experiences our goals lead us to seek. Someone hoping to understand more may look for perspectives that complicate a familiar story. They may become interested in the reasons behind another person’s conduct or in evidence that challenges their own judgment. Such encounters could provide material for developing a more differentiated understanding.

This interpretation fits the intellectual-growth framework, but the longitudinal study did not test that sequence of events. The distinction matters: a goal can predict a later outcome even when researchers have not established the process connecting them. We can consider perspective seeking as a possible pathway while keeping the explanation open (Bauer & McAdams, 2010; Bauer et al., 2015).

Meaningful Participation Offers Connection and Capability

Self-determination theory supplies a useful supporting account. Richard Ryan, Veronika Huta, and Edward Deci (2008) describe autonomy, competence, and relatedness as basic psychological needs. Autonomy concerns acting with a sense of personal endorsement. Competence involves experiencing effectiveness, and relatedness concerns meaningful connection with others. Their account of living well emphasizes goals and circumstances that support these needs.

Relationship research offers a more specific account of participation. Amy Canevello and Jennifer Crocker (2010) studied college roommate pairs using repeated questionnaires. Goals focused on supporting another person were associated with patterns of responsiveness: understanding, validation, and care that could be reciprocated within the relationship. Goals focused on protecting a desired self-image showed a different pattern. The findings suggest why the intentions we bring to interaction may matter alongside the amount of time we spend together.

These compassionate and self-image goals differ from Bauer and McAdams’s growth orientations. The roommate studies help us think about relationship processes, but cannot establish cause and effect. They also do not show what produced the later well-being differences in the growth-goal study. The needs framework offers a possible explanation to investigate (Canevello & Crocker, 2010; Ryan et al., 2008).

The Reasons Behind a Growth Goal

There is another distinction within any growth aim: how freely we endorse it. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan (2000) distinguish what people pursue from why they pursue it. Autonomous motivation involves acting for reasons we accept as our own; controlled motivation involves pressure, including pressure we place on ourselves. A personally endorsed commitment can remain demanding or unpleasant at times. Autonomy does not require independence from other people.

A volunteer might seek unfamiliar perspectives from curiosity, or feel compelled to appear unusually insightful. Someone might help from care, or because being indispensable seems necessary to retain approval. These examples illustrate different reasons for pursuing an activity. They add a question about the quality of motivation without creating new categories within the two-path model. The growth orientation and the reasons sustaining it both deserve attention (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Ryan et al., 2008).

Bringing Learning and Meaningful Participation Together

The Same Activity Can Support Both Orientations

Return to the community project. A conversation might challenge an assumption and deepen a friendship. Teaching a skill might clarify our understanding while making a valued contribution possible. Learning and participation can occur within the same experience, even when the hopes bringing us to it differ.

Carl Rogers adds a humanistic perspective on their connection. In his account of the good life, increasing openness allows people to encounter their feelings and circumstances with less defensive distortion. He also describes becoming a participant in experience and discovering its meaning as it unfolds. A direction can change as experience reveals what matters more than expected. Understanding and living meet in this willingness to let experience inform the person we are becoming (Rogers, 1961, pp. 186–189). This clinical and theoretical perspective offers a way to think about integration; it does not test the two-path model.

We can use the distinction to become more specific about an aspiration. Two questions may help: What would I like to understand more adequately? What relationship, ability, or contribution would I like to deepen? These questions invite closer attention to what we hope will change.

The volunteer could pair learning about barriers to attendance with helping create a gathering that neighbors can join. During it, attention matters as well as presence: listening to a newcomer may reveal something worth reconsidering and help that person feel included. This imagined example brings Waldinger and Schulz’s discussion of time and attention into an everyday setting (Waldinger & Schulz, 2023, pp. 118–121). Participation should remain responsive to capacity and boundaries; caring does not require accepting harmful treatment.

We can also be clearer about what would count as change. Understanding might become less one-sided, while a relationship might become more reciprocal or an activity more engaging. These observations answer different questions. Feeling satisfied cannot certify the adequacy of every judgment, and a sophisticated explanation cannot establish that our lives have become more fulfilling. The research gives us reason to attend to both kinds of outcome (Bauer & McAdams, 2010; Bauer et al., 2015).

There is no established requirement to divide our efforts equally between the two orientations. Illness, financial pressure, care responsibilities, or limited opportunity may narrow what is available. The growth-motivation framework itself acknowledges the importance of basic needs and its limits as an account of development. Seeking stability or protecting an existing source of connection can be a reasonable priority (Bauer et al., 2015; Ryan et al., 2008).

A Few Words by Psychology Fanatic

The two people at the community project may leave with changes neither could have specified beforehand. One may understand a neighbor more generously. The other may discover an ability through working beside someone else. Their original hopes still matter, while the experience remains larger than the plan.

When we consider our own growth, we can ask what kind of change we are seeking and make room to notice what develops. There is value in an understanding that becomes more honest and in a life that becomes more available to meaningful participation. We need not demand that every goal accomplish both. We can give each a place in deciding how we want to live.

Associated Concepts

• Ego development: Changes in how people understand themselves and the social world, including greater ability to recognize differences and bring perspectives together.
• Narrative identity: The evolving life story through which people connect past experiences, present concerns, and imagined futures.
• Subjective well-being: How people evaluate and experience their lives, including life satisfaction and pleasant and unpleasant feelings.
• Flow state: Absorption in an activity with clear goals, useful feedback, and challenges suited to a person’s skills.
• Learning and uncertainty: Making room for questions and incomplete understanding while considering new information and perspectives.
• Self-determination theory: A theory of motivation that emphasizes autonomy, competence, and relatedness as basic psychological needs.

References

Bauer, Jack J.; McAdams, Dan P. (2010). Eudaimonic Growth: Narrative Growth Goals Predict Increases in Ego Development and Subjective Well-Being 3 Years Later. Developmental Psychology, 46(4), 761–772. DOI: 10.1037/a0019654.
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Bauer, Jack J.; Park, Sun W.; Montoya, R. Matthew; Wayment, Heidi A. (2015). Growth Motivation Toward Two Paths of Eudaimonic Self-Development. Journal of Happiness Studies, 16(1), 185–210. DOI: 10.1007/s10902-014-9504-9.
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Canevello, Amy; Crocker, Jennifer (2010). Creating Good Relationships: Responsiveness, Relationship Quality, and Interpersonal Goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(1), 78–106. DOI: 10.1037/a0018186.
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Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1998). Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life. Basic Books. ISBN: 9780465024117.
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Deci, Edward L.; Ryan, Richard M. (2000). The “What” and “Why” of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268. DOI: 10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01.
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Rogers, Carl R. (1961). On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. Houghton Mifflin. Kindle edition consulted; original work published 1961. Kindle ASIN: B00AD9YL6C.
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Ryan, Richard M.; Huta, Veronika; Deci, Edward L. (2008). Living Well: A Self-Determination Theory Perspective on Eudaimonia. Journal of Happiness Studies, 9(1), 139–170. DOI: 10.1007/s10902-006-9023-4.
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Waldinger, Robert; Schulz, Marc (2023). The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. Simon & Schuster. eBook ISBN: 9781982166717.
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