building esteem

The importance of having a Personal Development Plan

A personal development plan is a road-map to plan your goals and aspirations in the area of your self development. It is similar to setting goals, however it involves a much more detailed and thorough analysis. It is not just a listing of personal development goals that you desire, but rather it is a plan for the whole process of achieving those aspirations.

Although it is in essence a goal setting plan, however due to the nature of personal development, a slightly different approach would be more suitable and effective as opposed to using the goal setting method. Hence, the reason for having personal development plan.

For many people who are serious about success, goal setting is a must. However, many do not set goals for the area of their personal development. People normally have financial goals, health goals, career/professional goals, spiritual goals and relationship goals. However, they do not have goals for their personal development.

The danger in not having personal development goals is as you get more and more caught up in the process of achieving goals, you will unconsciously neglect learning and improving further. Moreover, when people start seeing success, many tend to become complacent and stop their development. It is this complacency that usually causes many successful individuals to consequently fall back and fail.

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. Current state review – Analyze what are your current abilities, strengths, weaknesses, skills, comfort zone, problem areas etc.

2. Identify your desired state – What skill level or ability to you wish to have? To achieve the goals that you have, what are the strengths that you need? Which weaknesses must be eliminated? The idea is to focus more on what is needed for your immediate goals or situation. It is not to eliminate all weaknesses and become an expert in everything.

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 idea behind the personal development plan is pretty simple. However, it is vital that you make sure that you do a proper, detailed personal development plan and have thought through each section comprehensively. This ensures that you will be headed the right way with it.

Having a personal development plan helps you make sure your knowledge, skills and abilities are constantly upgraded. Because when all is said and done, it is your knowledge that ultimately affects the quality of your lives and your level of success. Don’t neglect it.

Tags: education, example personal development plan, personal development, personal development plan, personal growth, self help, self improvement, success, writing a personal development plan