“Your level of success will seldom exceed your level of personal development.”
-Jim Rohn
Commitment to growing yourself is non-negotiable to becoming a successful and confident leader. Working on yourself can increase your confidence, skills, emotional intelligence, and empathy and make you a better leader. It can also increase your capacity to enjoy the successes that you accomplish and feel better.
Creating a personal development plan is essential so that you are clear about where you are, where you want to go, and how you want to get there.
How to Create a Personal Development Plan
In this post, we will walk through the steps to take and the questions to answer so that you can create a personal development plan customized to you.
Awareness
The first step in creating a personal development plan is to become aware of where you are now.
Getting to where you are going becomes much easier when you know where you are starting from.
Bringing awareness to where you are now can be a tremendous first step in improving areas of focus in your life.
It can help illuminate problems you didn’t know were there and explain why you do what you do.
To do this step, answer these questions:
- What are you thinking?
- What are the top 3 feelings you experience each day?
- What are your current struggles and challenges right now?
These questions will help you understand your current thinking and feeling habits. It will also be helpful to identify where you have pain points and what you want to change.
Resources:
- 3 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed at Work (free guide)
- Asking Better Questions (blog post)
- How to Manage Your Mind (blog post)
The End Destination
Where do you want to go?
What do you want to achieve by creating a personal development plan?
This step is crucial because it gives direction, intention, and focus.
It also helps you prioritize and constrain your options and what you want to work on now.
Knowing where you want to go is important because you want to see the destination you are working towards.
Think carefully about what you want to achieve.
Most people aspire to specific goals because of how they imagine reaching them will make them feel.
But those feelings are available to you now. Once you learn to conjure those feelings up, you can experience the emotions at the end of your destination.
Questions to ask yourself about where you want to go:
- Where do you want to go? (What is your end destination?)
- How do you imagine you will feel once you get there?
- Why do you want to reach this particular goal?
- What is someone who has already achieved this goal thinking?
By answering these questions, you will have a clear destination and a start of a roadmap to how to create this goal in your life.
Plan to Get There
The next phase in creating your personal development plan is to plan how you will go from where you are now to where you want to go.
- Make a list of all the ways that you think you can accomplish moving from where you are to where you want to go
- Decide what ways you are going to commit to in your plan
- Write down each thing that may come up that may stop or hinder you on your way to reaching your goal
- Come up with solutions for each thing that may hinder you
- Put your plan into action
- Review and evaluate each week how your plan is going
- Adjust and refine your plan as necessary
These steps to create a personal development plan will help you focus on achieving the results you want to make.
A Final Note
You can use this process of creating a personal development plan each time you have a new goal or area of focus that you want to work on. It can be applied to learning new skills, habits, or a way of being. By creating a personal development plan, you ensure that you know where you are and where you are going and have thought through a plan about how to get there.