A personal development plan is a map of your self development journey. It is basically a goal setting practice, but specifically for the area of personal development. It is for planning your aspirations in regards to personal development. Among other things, it involves identifying what skills you need to learn, the aspects of yourself needs to be improved, abilities that are you lacking and areas which needs to be given priority for improvement.
Due to the nature of self improvement, using a different approach to the traditional goal setting practice would make it much more effective and suitable. This is why for all personal development goals we should have a separate personal development plan for it.
Naturally, in goal setting most people will focus on setting goals for their health, career/business and finances. Goals for other areas of life are neglected more often than not. Such as emotional goals, relationship goals, religious/spiritual goals and of course personal development goals.
It is very important to have personal development goals because when we are in the midst of trying to achieve all the other goals, we often get caught up in the process and will neglect learning, improving, and developing new skills and abilities. In addition to that, once we start getting results and success, we will naturally start to relax, take it easy and get complacent. It is complacency that is usually the downfall of any successful person.
Having a personal development plan helps us ensure that we are continually working on ourselves to prevent this complacency. In a nutshell, the basic premise of a personal development plan involves 3 steps ;
1. Identify where you are now - Firstly do an analysis of your your major strengths, weaknesses, skills, natural talents etc. This helps you identify which part of yourself you need to focus on.
2. Identify the wanted state - Next you identify where you want to be instead. To achieve your goals, what are the strengths that you need? What are the weaknesses that you must eliminate? What skills or ability do you need to have? What needs to be worked on for you to get to the next level.
3. Bridging the gap - The last step is to develop a plan to bridge the gap between your current state and your desired state as identified in steps 1 and 2. This includes planning what action to take, which resources to obtain, how to get the resource, setting schedules and finally the overall timeline as well as key milestones of your personal development plan.
The basic premise is pretty simple, however it is important that you spend some time on it and come up with a good plan so you’ll be headed the right way and not waste any time.
With a personal development plan, you will ensure that you are continually upgrading your knowledge, abilities and skills while also working to eliminate your weaknesses. At the end of the day, it is these factors that determine the level of success you experience in life. All us should have a personal development plan.
