People move around frequently these days. It's not uncommon for a person to live and work in several different countries during a lifetime. It's not uncommon for a person to move around and work at several different jobs within one country. Such changes are external and bring about a shift in the scenery and the furniture of one's life.

What of the changes that take place within a person?

I think there are at least three major shifts in personal development that correlate with significant changes that a person might make in his or her thinking.

First, when going from childhood into puberty, around that same time, the mind moves from concrete operations to the ability to abstract. So, people change the landscape of their thinking; instead of just lining up blocks in a sequence, they start wondering about "blockness," or "sequence", or "lining up". This is when children begin a journey through idealism as well.

By idealism I do not mean philosophical idealism in which the mind constitutes the real world. I am talking about the elevation of the ideal. The ideal is both the perfect, the consummate, the supreme, and it is the conceptual, theoretical, the suppositional. So, a person caught in the grip of the ideal is the one who holds a model in his or her head of "the way it ought to be" and then argues with everyone about that, pointing out the differences, usually seen in the form of faults, between the way "it" currently is and the superlatives of said model.

There is no winning an argument with an adolescent about "the way it ought to be", or about the differences between what a parent has put out as their values and what the adolescent sees to be their conduct. Thus, the great offence of hypocrisy is the outcry of an adolescent mind.

The second major change in personal development is the maturing of the brain near the end of adolescence. The organisational centre of the brain, the frontal and pre-frontal cortexes, continue to develop until they are complete at about 18 to 20 years of life. Until then, a person is not very good at paying attention, organising him or herself, engaging in creative problem solving, and being able to shift set. This is why ADHD used to be regarded to be only a problem of childhood – because many children suspected of having it became more well organised when they reached adulthood.

When one has become more competent at self-organisation, more self-regulated, then one can be more efficient and productive. At that point it might seem like it's possible to do many things at the same time. One might take on several projects and start working both ends against the middle. When you couple idealism with organisation, it is a powerful combination, and for a person in the prime of both of these mental landscapes, personal power and ability can become intoxicating.

Now, we come to the next major change. Just as some people never really develop the ability to think abstractly, and so remain rather concrete, so other people never become very well organised, and in the same way some people do not experience this next developmental shift. However, for those who do, there comes a time at which a person stops and takes a look around. The question, "So, how's that been working for you?" comes to mind. Are the perfect models still shiny and bright? Or do they have rust and mould starting to mar their finish? Are you really able to do everything, or does your heart race when you want to sleep, and do you dread another project?

In terms of the spiritual life, this is also when a person makes a significant shift. They will likely have already broken with their parents' style and theology, perhaps choosing a different church, or not to go to church at all. They may have looked at church and seen its hypocrisy and its mingling with politics or its aping of the organisational strategies of big business and have concluded that the church, and Christianity, is so flawed as to not be worth their trust.

What comes later is a further readjustment. What comes later is a rethinking of one's idealism with regard to one's self-regulation. What comes later is a backing away from it all to create "space" on all these things, including serious "work" on what one believes. The idealism gets spoiled, but the self-organisation allows a person to keep working hard trying to make a life plan pan out. And often about this time children and career obligations take over.

There are other shifts that come later for some people as the person ages, especially as the self-organisational abilities don't result in what one had believed would ensue, and then as one looks back over it all and tries to make sense of a life. However, these three mentioned above seem very important to me. For in the mix of them all God interrupts a person with the inconvenient truth of his existence and presence. That can derail the most exquisite plans and reconfigure the brightest ideal. When that happens, a person feels like he or she has not simply changed the external landscape of life, but also the internal capacities to perceive and understand what is going on all around and deep inside.