What Should be Included in a Personal Development Plan?
Looking back on my past experiences, I realize that my life has improved following a personal growth path. I don’t regret anything, neither the mistakes nor the pains, but surely today I can stop and say to myself that yes, surely there was a better way to deal with everything. This is what I want to discuss today, and specifically what should be included in a personal development plan.
There are many good tips that can be gathered in texts from the past. Some tips are ageless. Yet you can do better than summarize everything in “eat healthy, stay fit and work hard”. Most of us have dreams, goals, and we want to grow and improve in our own way. So I asked myself, what should be included in a personal development plan, really?
I want to elaborate this on every point, but here’s the gist:
Develop your vision
Check the feasibility
Plan goals / checkpoints
Improve your habits
Establish your limits
Develop your vision
If you don’t know where you want to go, you can’t go anywhere. It applies to everything: physical well-being, business plans, quality of relationships. I did understand where I wanted to go too late.
You can wait for the world to turn against you and be forced to change, or you can be proactive and not wait to find yourself in despair. You will have to work hard to imagine better scenarios for yourself.
That’s something you are not used to it, so don’t think that the first visions will be perfect. Imagine how your life can improve. Improve it again. Take that scene to the extreme! Cultivating a brand new imagination takes time.
Check the feasibility
Imagination is of no use if your scenarios are fantastic. You can’t ride a dragon if you don’t have the science to create one first. Your visions must be solidly planted in the reality you know.
Your goals must be feasible. Your knowledge of the world limits your way of thinking as much as your successes. This is why it is important to test yourself and test your knowledge. You don’t have to be afraid of the unknown, you have to be afraid of the fact that you still haven’t learned enough.
The importance of broadening one’s horizons is making new experiences. You should want to enrich your sense of reality that will allow you to design better scenarios. Why? Because as we know the world around us better, feasibility increases.
Plan checkpoints
Look at what should be included in a personal development plan as if our life was a video game. You go through levels. Mistakes can be made, and deviations from the original path is an option. Always know where you are on the path. So use checkpoints!
Quantify the overall success (the completion of the final goal) and select the moments in which you can take slightly different actions from what was planned. A personal growth plan lasts a lifetime, and it is difficult to stay focused. If you allow yourself periods of leisure at the right time, you will gain time, mental health and physical health.
Improve your habits
We grew up in a world where there are no instructions for life. We all learned the same way: that’s called adaptation. But there are better ways. You have to keep improving by studying books, taking courses, acquiring new skills. These are just new habits that improve our knowledge. They allow us to do better things in better ways.
Establish limits
Learn to say “No” to those who are not worth your time. 80-90% of people want one thing from you… you do what they want. They will lie to you, deceive you, hurt you. Perhaps this is inevitable. But you must learn from those events.
You have to determine what your limits are to say No when you don’t want to do or say something. If you understand what this implies, you will act now to learn anything that will allow you to limit your losses when those inevitable moments arrive.
If you don’t know where you want to go, you can’t go anywhere. It applies to everything: physical well-being, business plans, quality of relationships. I did understand where I wanted to go too late.
