Struggling with self: the personal projects of students seeking psychological counseling.

Personal projects can be described as self-articulated goals and related sequences of actions. In order to investigate what kind of personal projects people with psychological problems have, and how they work on them, 28 counselling client students, 44 students of psychology, and 45 students of technology completed a Finnish version of Little's (1987) Personal Project Inventory. The results showed that the clients scored lower on project accomplishment than other groups. Their personal projects were frequently self-related, while those of the technology students were often task-related. The higher their sense of coherence, self-esteem, mental health and life satisfaction, the more subjects expected to accomplish their projects, the more frequently they described task-related projects, the less negative affect they reported, and the less frequently they described self-related projects. These results suggest that psychologically distressed individuals struggle with self-related projects and have problems in accomplishing their projects.