What does Personal development look like for Generation Z?

If you’ve heard about the “social dilemma”, have you ever wondered how the current generation is coping with personal growth in this era?

Designed for NARU by graphic designer, Celene Yorobe.

NARU is our start-up focused on creating a safe-space community for each individual to work on their personal growth. Knowing that this is no easy task — with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. all being fuelled by the “attention economy”, FOMO (fear of missing out) and self-comparison, the three largest killers of dreams — we decided nobody had a clue where to start and if there was even an answer to be found. All we knew that if anything, we had to ask the generation Z-ers themselves.

Using the WHO-DO-BE-FEEL-CONCERN framework, we aim to break down Naru’s findings from 51 survey respondents as we asked about their personal development journey and their social circle. Here are our key findings:

1. There are two types of personal development journeyers: life-visionaries and self-healers.
2. The three areas of focus for generation Z include career development, self-improvement and maintaining a work/life balance (once the other two are accomplished).
3. The perfect personal development solution would be intuitive to use, inspire motivation, be customisable and harness social accountability.
4. The highest form of motivation for generation Z-ers in pursuing their goals start from being in a stretch zone. However, when they reach burnout, re-focusing on self-care is necessary to bring motivation back. Likewise, being in complete boredom requires a boost of motivation to kick-start the cogs of productivity again.
5. The biggest road-block for generation Z-ers in pursuing their goals is the inability to be self-accountable, regardless of endless productivity tools already available to them.
6. The four criteria of healthy social accountability are: consistent support when asked, safe space with close friends, listening without judgement, and seek help without guilt.

Now, let’s go through each category of the framework in more detail.

WHO: Personas

Question: “I’ve been struggling to get myself out of bed these days 😞. What have you been working on recently?”

There were two categories of survey respondents identified:

1. Life visionary: like the most of us, with a goal to chase, and not enough time to pursue it. They are motivated to get a job and to advance in their professional career. They have a productivity-driven mindset, visualising their goals and working towards them tirelessly.
2. Self-healer: in the process of winding down from their previously cluttered lives, prioritising self-care and pursuing creative activities like painting, cooking and embroidery. Perhaps they were inspired by their boredom at home during the pandemic and rearranged their life to cut off what is no longer important to them.

Both stood firmly in their belief and motivation, away from one another with the only linking node being “mental health”. This may mean that a balance between the two personas’ actions are required, between productivity-focused and self-care oriented to sustain mental health (see “FEEL: motivation”).

Personas: Affinity map clustering from data of 51 respondents. (Nov 2021)

DO: Goals, jobs to be done

Question: When was the last time you started something that you couldn’t finish? Can you tell me about it? 🧩

In our audience’s journey of improvement, we observe three different areas.

1. Career development: the development of one’s career, from getting a job to pursuing a passion project.
2. Self-improvement: the pursuit of knowledge through study and learning a new skill such as reading, music or picking up a new language.
3. Maintaining work-life balance: the ongoing prioritisation in usually areas of health and wellbeing over one’s busy work lifestyle.

Interestingly, the challenges faced in each category were also identified to be rather specific and somewhat mutually exclusive. These will be revisited in the below “CONCERN: frustrations, road-blockers” section.

#1 Career development:

• Starting a career is difficult when obtaining a new skill for the first time. Usually after a new goal is attempted, people can lose a sense of progress and feel anxious about being on the right track.
• Students out of university are also challenged by time management to prioritise finding a job, as countless distractions from social activities, hobbies and personal choices arise from a vast sea of possibilities (see my past article “paradox of choice”).

#2 Self-improvement:

• Consistency and the prioritisation of tasks we set out for ourselves is hard when we are held accountable only to ourselves.
• A lonely self-improvement journey is often met by the challenges of having low self-confidence and belief in one’s tortoise-pace progress. With the seed of self-doubt planted in procrastination, “Who cares?” asks our laziness.

#3 Maintaining work/life balance:

• With the unexpected adjustments we’ve had to make in our lives due to the pandemic, many have found it difficult to adjust social, personal and work life with no separation of environment. As we normally set boundaries for different areas of our life with actions to be done, such as going to the gym after work, arriving home, and driving away for a holiday — perhaps one of today’s biggest challenges are, how can this balance be maintained in the confinement of remote work, less physical contact, and travel restrictions?

Goals: Affinity map clustering from data of 51 respondents. (Nov 2021)

BE: Features

Question: Imagine your perfect personal development app. How does it encourage you to achieve your goals everyday and stay productive? 🔮

We asked users to imagine a potentially “magical” app that could encourage them to feel motivated and more connected with their close friends. Possible features laid in a solution covering four areas:

1. Social accountability: giving users a safe space to focus on their goals with the support of friends whom they trust, perhaps using gamification to promote a healthy competition. (We note that social rewards can be more harm than good when the variety of competition is too high — e.g. with social media and a competition of influence, followers and engagement. A “healthy competition” would utilise a small group of friends with similar goals, e.g. to run a 5km race in a month’s time, and allow for honesty and vulnerability to reach the goal as a team.)
2. Motivational: when all else fails and there are 10 things on the to-do list they haven’t completed, respondents report that they generally deter to watch inspirational content, even encouraging quotes to remind them to not give up and see the positive side (see “FEEL: motivation” section).
3. Customisation: as everyone’s journey is different, it is natural for users to wish to customise their tasks and progress for various aspects of life. Features suggested here included: journalling, categories of life, personal reminders and tracking progress.
4. Intuitive UI: unsurprisingly, many respondents voiced their frustration with using multiple productivity, tracking and reminder apps — which all simultaneously fight for their attention. The challenge here for our app’s design is to meet the requirement of being intuitive and simple enough for the user to focus on their “job to be done”, frankly, and not the interface.

Features: Affinity map clustering from data of 51 respondents. (Nov 2021)

FEEL: Motivation

Question: I have things I want to work on but sometimes it’s hard just to get out of bed. How do you try to stay motivated? 👨‍🏭

Given the way the question is asked, most respondents may have voiced how they would ideally like to think regarding how to stay motivated. We observed a spectrum of responses, similar to the Stress and Pressure Performance curve used for well-being management and sport psychology.

1. Goal-focused, productive: the majority of respondents feel that having a clear goal and vision driven by their purpose of life motivates them at their lowest. Common methods of using this motivation includes starting small habits, being consistent with their efforts, and perhaps involving others in their projects by helping someone or working alongside them. This mimics the ideal stretch zone in the middle of the curve.
2. Punishment: as personal development is a difficult journey for the self, often the voice we use to talk to ourselves is different to how we may talk to someone else in our exact position. Some respondents feel that using harsh punishment as a way of motivating themselves is necessary when they are too “in their head” and on a stand-still. This mimics shifting from the boredom zone into the middle of the curve.
3. Forgiving: some respondents on the other side of the spectrum have little to no expectations for themselves, and are likely to be recovering from a recent burnout. They emphasise self-care and prioritising mental health over productivity and general goal-chasing. This mimics shifting from the stress zone back into the middle of the curve.

Motivation: Affinity map clustering from data of 51 respondents. (Nov 2021)

There is much psychological research into how humans think between zones of comfort / stretch / strain, boredom and stress. A safe bet to say is that most humans flourish in the middle of the curve and hence will use their emotions and self-talk to shift their way of thinking to the opposite side of what they are currently feeling, in order to motivate themselves into the ideal stretch zone.

Stress and the Pressure Performance Curve (source: delphis.org.uk)

CONCERN: Frustrations, road-blockers

Question: Do these tools fall short for you? What do they lack that would make them more useful?

After giving survey respondents a list of productivity tools to choose (e.g. to-do list, calendar, reminders) and scale by frequency of usage, we asked about their pain points surrounding these tools. There were four general areas of frustrations detected.

1. Lack self-motivation: most respondents who used the above tools had no problem with how they worked, other than that it didn’t solve their “job-to-be-done”. They could not be held accountable of their reminders, to-do list or calendar, when they simply felt no motivation to work on their tasks. The problem was greater than having the tools available — it was making these tools work for them, not against them when they fell out of sync with their schedule.
2. Generic: another concern for respondents was not being able to customise their productivity tool to changing priorities in life and perhaps different difficulty of tasks. The tool we design should allow for the flexibility and trial and error of human experimentation.
3. Not convenient: a couple of respondents felt that not being able to access all their productivity tools at once on both their desktop and mobile was inconvenient. (This seems like a one-fits all solution, however, the lesson learnt here is careful integration with existing tools to let users transition between their current processes with new ones).
4. Not intuitive: from age-old methods of pen and paper, some respondents feel that having to do a lot of computational input would deter them away from focusing on their tasks. Another mentioned that “when things start to get busy… it gets a little disorienting”, which eludes back to falling into the trap of having too many features and high-priority alerts that may confuse users even more.

These frustrations were unsurprisingly solved by the solutions they proposed, for a “magical” app to be intuitive, customisable, motivational and to harness social accountability.

Frustrations: Affinity map clustering from data of 51 respondents. (Nov 2021)

Extra — Social accountability criteria

Question: Just like how you’re helping me, have you ever received support from the people around you? What did you like or not like about it? 💊

As NARU’s mission is to help harness the power of social accountability for those in their personal-growth journey, we asked this question to understand how respondents felt in their natural environment when receiving support from friends. The criteria below were observed to be commonly mentioned.

1. Consistent support when asked: when asking for help, respondents feel better when there is an available form of support from their friends. Any inconsistency could dig deeper pain in individuals asking for help, as one respondent said, “the waiting game isn’t fun”.
2. Safe space with close friends: in an ever-growing online community of both real and transactional friendships, respondents highlighted the need for a safe space in order to show up as an honest version of themselves. As we share raw emotions and ideas with friends and loved ones, the only way to seek support is by hiding any egoistical persona and being humble enough to accept oneself completely.
3. Listening without judgement: one of the hardest things to sit through is unrequited advice and judgement for your mistakes, as much as you have sought out courage to be a truly honest version of yourself to ask for help. The most dangerous part of social accountability would be added pressure and judgement from an individual who takes on the responsibility as the “advice-giver” and not an open-minded “listener”.
4. Seek help without guilt: for a few respondents, the feeling of burdening someone else with their problems may prevent them from reaching out in the first place (or perhaps past bad experienced in the last three criteria). In this situation, professionals who are paid to listen and help individuals self-reflect may be beneficial for them to be more proactive in the future to reach out to friends, once established with a positive experience.

Showing up for friends who need you and embracing humility to ask someone for help is no easy task. It can take many trials of practice and maturing for a brightly-opportunistic yet confused generation of young adults to get it right. We are living amidst a pandemic of loneliness, social distraction and craving of purpose. There is no better time to start solving this problem than now.

Social accountability criteria: Affinity map clustering from data of 51 respondents. (Nov 2021)

Thank you.

Your time spent reading this article in parts or in full are greatly appreciated. Thank you for taking interest in NARU’s research in the social dilemma generation. Keep up to date by following us on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. Have thoughts? Comment or drop them at ninaruservices@gmail.com — we’d be happy to hear you out or have a conversation.

Cheers,

Michelle
Co-founder, Product designer @ NARU