Creating Your Personal Development Plan
"A Journey of Ten Thousand Miles Begins with the First Step".
Wise words! But what do they mean to someone who is trying to create a personal development plan? I am sure that you have some big aspirations in your life. Perhaps you want to cure world hunger, have your own yacht, or maybe your goal is simply to raise a good family. I am also sure that you're looking at your current situation and thinking "How in the world am I going to achieve all these things?" Below, you'll find an easy-to-follow guide for making a personal development plan. Making a well-organized plan will give you some structure to implement in order to achieve of your dreams and goals.
Step#1: Identify Your Goals, Dreams, and Aspirations
Try to make a mental movie of how you want your life to look and what your ideal self looks like. We, as human beings are naturally goal seeking. We like to move towards the things that preoccupy our minds and the things we think about most. If you don't have a clear mental image of which direction you are headed you can very easily get stuck where you are. Or worse, move in a completely opposite direction.
Once you have identified your goals, try to experience them as reality. This helps the mind to accept your goals as true, and in turn, the mind will go to work programming the goals deep into your subconscious. Once ingrained into your subconscious mind, your goals and aspirations start becoming the fabric of your identity, part of who you are. This might appear to be easy, but the fact is, very few people are clear about exactly what it is they want out of life, and hence they have a weak identity and weak self-concept. They drift aimlessly and lazily through the world with little to no self-improvement. You can set yourself apart from the directionless masses by seeing and knowing exactly where you are going.
Step #2: Align Your Goals with Your Core Values
Once you have a very clear mental picture of what you want out of life, you must begin to understand "WHY?" Why do you have big goals? Why should you be successful? Why do you do what you do when you do it? Do you get self-esteem and self-confidence or are you looking for approval from others? Take some time to relate your goals with your deep seated emotional motivations. By answering the question of "why", you should begin to find some alignment between your aspirations and your core values. This is important because your long term goals absolutely must line up with your individual core values. If your goals are out of alignment with your core values, you need to re-evaluate your goals or your personal development plan will be for naght and you will only sabotage yourself.
Step #3: Get Passionate
Your goals must ignite passion within you. Search within your heart the kind of things you love to do and stay consistent with those things. When you follow your heart's desires you will always be enthusiastic. It’s this enthusiasm that is going to give you will power and motivation when things get tough! In the absence of knowledge, resources, or capital, a highly passionate person will somehow exhaust all the means to make his or her vision come true. The passion trait is inherent in all humans and should be relatively easy to express if you have already clearly defined your goals and those goals are in alignment with your core values.
Step #4: Create Small Actionable Steps and Implement Your Personal Development Plan
Pick one of your major goals that you don't know how to achieve and examine it more closely. Think about the goal and you will realize that it is made up of a number of smaller goals, each of which is in turn made up of other small goals. Grab a piece of paper, write down a major goal at the top, and below it, write down the steps you can take to achieve this goal. In effect, each of these steps represents a mini-goal, and each of these mini-goals can be broken down further if necessary into more manageable chunks. Do not become obsessed with achieving each minor step on your way to the major goal. You may find that some steps can be skipped, some become unnecessary, and some new steps that you didn't think about may appear.
An example may be that you want to own your own business and you know nothing about business. You may break your goal down into something like:
- Find out about local business classes. When are they scheduled and how much do they cost?
- Research various business opportunities and pick the best one.
- Save up or raise enough capital to start the business.
- Start your business and reach profitability!
This is a very oversimplified illustration of breaking down one's goals. In reality, a complete personal development plan would contain a lot more steps and each one of those steps would be broken down further into daily or weekly actions you could take. At this point, you should realize that the journey towards a really big goal is made up of many small steps and more importantly, it begins with just one small step! If any one step seems too big or too complicated, simply break it down into smaller steps until you are satisfied that each step is manageable and achievable.
A Final Word on Your Personal Development Plan
Be humble every step of your journey. For every small step you achieve, exercise humility. Never be boastful of your small achievements; and never brag about small wins. Make a habit of not getting comfortable or satisfied with achieving small goals. Humility is a virtue and self-actualization graced with humility is far likelier to be achieved.
