Maturity

As I am someone who is always very interested in PSYCHOLOGY and SELF-IMPROVEMENT stuff, I am going to blog on maturity as something just strike me to blog about it. Please bear with me for a while as this may get abit long and intriguing.

Before I discussed in depth on Maturity, I must first defined it.

In the psychology term, maturity is used to "indicate that a person responds to the circumstances or environment in an appropriate manner. This response is generally learned rather than instinctual. Maturity also encompasses being aware of the correct time and place to behave and knowing when to act in serious or non-serious ways." (Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia)

Then, by this definition, how do we judge know if a person is mature or not?

As we know, maturity is a trait of personality. And whether we say a person is mature or not, it depends not solely by the person himself/herself but also by how others view him/her. So does maturity comes with age? That is true to a certain extend. If a person learnt from his/her previous experience and apply it in the next similar situation, then I would say the person has matured, as he has learnt from his/her experience.

Then on the other hand, if the person has no previous experience but his/her friends has similar experiece and he/she choose to behave how his/her friends behave, which is seen to be immature, she/he is immature as she is unable to decide for herself what she should be doing, despite not having the experience before.

So, if a person never learnt from the experience he/she had before and repeat the same mistakes over and over again, then I would say, maturity does not come with age because the person has not learnt over time.

Being a mature person, does not mean being a fully-grown up adult. A child can be mature in their own way too. For e.g., a child whose main role is to play and study, knowing his/her mother is sick and decided to help out in household chores instead of playing, is considered as mature.

Then when does immature happens?
It happenes when we put in too much beliefs, assumptions, perferences and prejudices into our thinking and behaviour and assume too much. It also happens when we fail to look at things at a more logical way and put too much emotions in it, that hides us away from the actual truth. It also happens when we become too attached to the situation or people and/or takes things too personal that we fails to look at thing in different perspectives.

Can anything be done?
YES! We can try to take a step back and look at things in another perspective, in a more logical way. Sometimes emotions just blurred us from the complete truth. Try to look at what has happened and remove all emotions and assumptions involved.

For e.g.

He/she is not talking to me. He/she does not care for me anymore."

We should not associate "He is not taking to me." with "he does not care for me anymore." because we are already associating it with our emotions involved. There could be other possible non-emotions related association like: he/she has lost his/her phone..... it could be she/he is busy? We should not make any assumptions or any association. We should find out more.

We should seek out the answers to questions that we do not know, before arriving at any conclusions and to be guided by reasons, rather than emotions.

To conclude, maturity is not innate in us. It can grow with every experiences we have, depending how we make use of each and every one of them. It also does not grow with age and there will be some people who are more mature while some who are childish less mature. But, we have to be aware that maturity is not constant throughout in different areas of ones life as one may have lesser experiences in one area and more in another.

Anyway, while looking for the definition of maturity, I came across this interesting website and it includes what is maturity, who is a mature person and suggestions to practice adult thinking.

A good to read website for all, whether you are mature or not. =)

Here is the website link: Maturity of Mind and Adult Behaviour.