How To Create A Personal Development Plan That Works For You

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If you’ve ever felt like you’re not really where you want to be in life, you’re not alone. Often times, this is the result of just going through our lives without following a clear path. Without a plan. If there’s something you want in life, you have to plan for it and take action towards it. Today I’ll help show you how to create a personal development plan that will help you up-level your life. Because all change starts from within ourselves.

“How time flies” will always remain a mystery to everyone. But at some point in life when we think about how the days, weeks, months, and years go by, we begin to feel stuck and ask ourselves why we have achieved little or nothing after all these years.

Often, we invest a lot of our time in doing things that do not have any positive impact on the development of our lives. We would rather scroll through the internet for hours, watch TV endlessly than do something towards making ourselves and our lives better.

Then suddenly, we begin to wonder why time moves so fast while we have achieved so little.

It’s not rocket science really.

If you are ever at this point in life, what you need is to set aside dedicated time for your personal development because the only way to become better in life is to take strategic steps towards becoming better. One strategic step you can take towards becoming better is to create a personal development plan that will work for you.

How To Create A Personal Development

Personal development includes the processes carried out to improve oneself through conscious habits, activities and actions.

A personal development plan is a guide that helps you to visualize your dream life and the steps you need to take to get there. It is a guide you can continuously use and revise as changes occur in your life, to create your dream life.

Creating a personal development plan will help you to overcome the feeling of being stuck, lost, or unmotivated.

The importance of creating a plan for your life cannot be overemphasized because it is the secret to being unique and the bridge that leads you towards the goals you want to achieve.

You must learn how to create a personal development plan if you need to readjust some things in your life, boost your growth, and live a life that you love. Having a detailed plan for future is as important as living itself because this is what will help you through your journey of achieving your goals in life.

There are some key areas in life that you need to have personal development plans for and they include, finance, physical health, mental & emotional health, and career. I also talk about this in more detail in my guide on how to create a five year plan for your life.

Below is a detailed step by step guide on how to create a personal development plan that works for you.

1. Evaluate your current life

The first step to take when you create a personal development plan for yourself is to evaluate the current life you are living.

At this point, you will need to analyse your life as a whole. You need to ask yourself some questions and answer them honestly. Some questions to ask yourself are:

“What do I like about my life right now?”
“What don’t I like about my life?”
“Am I living my dream life yet?”
“What would I like to change about my life now?”
“What is the definition of my dream life?”
“Am I productive at work?”
“Am I financially intelligent?”
“Do I take my physical and mental health seriously?” etc.

After asking yourself these questions, reflect on them for a while, and provide honest answers to them.

When you provide these answers, then you can evaluate the situation of your current life and point out the aspects you need to work on in order to be better. This will also serve as part of the guide to creating your personal development plan.

Evaluating your current life is a form of assessment that helps you to see a clearer picture of where you are currently and where you want to be in the future.

If you’re not quite sure where you want to be, you can also check out this post I wrote on how to find your purpose and passion in life as it might be useful to you.

2. Understand your visions and motive

After evaluating your current life, then you need to understand what your visions are. How do you picture your dream life? You need to point out how you picture your dream life in detail, such that you will have a very vivid picture of how you want it to be.

Some things you should point out are:

How you would dress
The type of people you will surround yourself with
How your dream home would look like
What your leisure time will be spent doing
How you would manage your finances
What your physical and mental health will be like, etc.

After stating out your visions in clear terms and understanding them, you also need to understand your motive for choosing each of your visions. Ask yourself some questions about why you chose the visions you stated out.

Understanding the reason why those visions are important to you will serve as a form of motivation and inspiration for you.

It will help you understand the goals that are truly important to you and why they are important to you. The moment your motivation begins to falter, knowing why you started working towards that dream, in the beginning, would help to fuel your motivation in order to continue towards achieving the dream.

Note that this process cannot be completed in a day, so take your time to go over it and provide the right answers.

3. Create and set your goals

Once you have been able to identify where you are, where you want to be, and what your dream life looks like, the next step is to get to work on bringing your dream life alive.

Bringing your dreams alive can be done by creating and setting goals that are in line with the dream you want to achieve and then going further to work towards achieving those goals.

If you want to move to the next level and develop your life, then you need to set the goals that would push you towards your dream life.

Write out at least 10 specific goals that you need to accomplish in every area of your life in order to achieve your dreams.

If you want more help with goal setting, you can also look at these 10 common goal setting mistakes people often make. Also check out these tips and ways to get motivated to achieve your goals.

4. Prioritize your goals

After creating and setting your goals, then you need to prioritize the most important goals from the list of goals you wrote out.

This is done by choosing the most important goals that you need to execute first amongst all the goals you have written down.

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5. Create and adopt positive habits

Aside from setting goals and implementing them, you have to create and adopt positive habits.

Habits are routine behaviours that we repeatedly carry out every day and these behaviours begin to occur subconsciously over time. Habits make up a very huge chunk of our day.

Your habits are a reflection of who you are and how your life will be, which is why you need to create, adapt, and implement positive habits in your life. If you want to live a positive and happy life, then you need to adopt positive habits and do away with the negative ones.

Without positive habits, actualizing your dreams will be very hard or in some cases, impossible.

For example, if you are a person who procrastinates a lot or is very lazy, then there is no way you are ever going to achieve your dreams because you keep on postponing what you are supposed to do till later. And then, in the end, you don’t get anything done and time just passes you by. You need to recognize such bad habits in your life and work on slowly changing them.

If you want to have a better financial life, then you need to adopt better savings and investment habits. Do away with wasteful spending.

Implementing positive habits will help to make your goals easier to achieve, thereby making your dreams come true faster.

6. Develop new and better skills

In order to get (most) things in life, you need to put in the work.

If you want to work on your personal development plan, then you must be willing to upgrade your skills and knowledge to the latest know-how in your industry. This would put you ahead of your competitors and help you to achieve better results with your goals and dreams.

For instance, if you plan to move up the ladder in your career, then you should consider taking new courses in your field, in order to give you a piece of better knowledge and higher certification that will qualify you for the position.

You have to stay up to date in your field in order for you to be accorded in high-esteem and given a better position.

7. Create an action plan

After prioritizing your most important goals, then you need to create an action plan. This is basically about figuring out the basic action steps you need to take to achieve your dream.

In your action plan, you should divide each of your actions to the specific tasks that you need to carry out daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly in order to achieve your dream. Doing this helps you to break your goals into small steps and makes it easier for you to carry them out.

You must also allocate time to accomplishing each of these tasks.

Each of these action steps you create must be added to your calendar so that you can point out when to do each of the tasks and set a reminder for yourself.

8. Take action

It’s not enough to create a goal or create an action plan, the main point is to start carrying out all the tasks you have assigned towards achieving your goals. Take action on your goals today because that is your only gateway to achieving your dreams!

Try your best to stick to your vision, goal, and action plan, then set a time to achieve them.

Also, don’t overwhelm yourself unnecessarily with all that you have to do. Take the steps gradually but consistently. Try your best not to lose motivation or inspiration along the way. Remember why you started in the first place and let that push you to action. Keep going until your dream becomes a reality.

9. Set a deadline

For every goal that you set, you need to set a deadline alongside. The truth is that life is short and time waits for no one. The best time to start is NOW and while you are starting now, you need to put in a conscious effort to be consistent with what you do towards achieving your goals.

Setting a deadline will help to hasten up what you are doing and give you a sense of urgency towards carting out the necessary tasks that you need to do.

Write the date and time you are expected to finish every task beside every goal that you set and try your best to meet up with the deadline.

10. Review your progress

One very important aspect that helps you to know how far you have gone in life or if you are doing the right or wrong thing is to sit down and review your progress right from when you began till where you are at the moment.

Reviewing your progress from time to time helps you to know what you are doing wrong, what you should stop doing, what you are doing right, and what you should do more of. If possible, do a daily review of your progress but if that would be too much for you, do a weekly review.

Final thoughts

Finally, a personal development plan is a very essential and amazing tool for anyone conscious about making all-round progress in life. This is why you need to learn how to create a personal development plan that works for you!

According to Brian Tracy, a personal development coach,

“Personal development is a major time-saver. The better you become, the less time it takes you to achieve your goals.”

So, after going through this article, schedule a time to start creating your personal development plan as soon as possible. In the end, you would be surprised at how much progress you have made in life just by following these simple steps and implementing them.

Living your dream life is not as difficult as you have always imagined it to be. What it takes is a planned and conscious effort towards achieving those dreams in order for them to come to reality.