9 Ways to Create a Personal Development Plan to Achieve Your Goals

One can never overemphasize the importance of a personal development plan as it provides a framework for identifying your areas of strengths and weaknesses in order to come up with a comprehensive guide that will help optimize your skills and capabilities while also improving the quality of your life.

A vision or goal-less life is a meaningless life. Follow the below steps now to create a personal development plan and achieve your goals:

1. Define Your Goals

This is the foremost stage of your personal development plan. You need to identify the things that are important to you, the set of new skills you want to acquire, achievements that will make you happier, the unfulfilled dreams you want to accomplish, and lots more.

What you do at the goal definition stage is to define the goals that are important to you the most.

This might be something related to your area of specialization, career or even something that can improve your personal life and promote self-esteem [such as weight loss, new hobby, new language, etc.].

The practical step to be taken here is to write down top 5 – 10 most important goals you will like to achieve in the next couple of weeks or months.

2. Prioritize Your Goals

This is the selection stage. What you will do here is to identify the most important goals out of the 5 – 10 goals you wrote down earlier. Any goal you select will become your area of focus henceforth.

One thing about this stage is that it might seem complicated and demanding at times, especially when you have a lot of goals you will like to achieve.

Never be tempted to select legions of goals at a time as you will eventually end up achieving none of the set goals. The fewer your main goal, the higher your chances of achieving the goals.

3. Set a Deadline for Your Goal

When you have a goal without knowing the exact period you want to achieve it, there is high tendency that such goal will never become a reality.

Also, if you intend achieving a massive project in a very close-by/short period of time, chances are it will not happen.

This is where the setting of deadline comes handy. You need to first consider the goal you intend achieving and discern how long it might take you to make it a reality.

You need to be as realistic and specific as much as you possibly can and make good assumptions time-wise.

Rather than saying “I want to become rich someday”. You should instead make plans and devise various strategies for boosting your daily, weekly and monthly income.

You also need to carefully ruminate on the intended goal and identify how long it might take you to achieve that.

Having set a realistic time frame of the goal, it is equally important to make total commitment towards achieving it on/before then.

Take the personal development plan seriously and re-visit it every day to keep your mind focused on it.

4. Take Action

Every goal is action-inclined. i.e. there are certain actions you must take to achieve that set goal.

Therefore, you need to write down a minimum of 3 – 6 actions you need to take to achieve the goal within the set time frame.

5. Develop New Skills

Whenever you intend achieving a new goal, you must keep it in mind that you must give something in return before you can get that which you earnestly desire.

This is where skill acquisition comes in. You have to learn and hone the relevant skills that will help enhance your set goals.

For example, if your goal is to leave your current and start your own business, you must learn about marketing, sales, entrepreneurship, customer support, need and problem identification, etc.

At this juncture, you are expected to write down the list of skills you must develop so as to achieve your desired goal.

6. Understand Your Strengths

We all as human being have specific areas that we are extremely good at. This is referred to as “strength”.

To achieve your goal, you need to identify your biggest strengths; your area of uniqueness and specialness.

This will provide you with the right confidence required to achieve your set goal.

Once you are able to identify your strengths, just write them any of them that can further help achieve your desired goal.

7. Recognize Threats

Look deep deeply into yourself and spot those behaviors and habits that can either support or limit you from achieving your set goal.

For instance, if your goal is to make 5 thousand dollars per month, then you need to stop spending irrationally and curb borrowing excessively.

Write down all these destructive habits and behaviors and make a firm decision to shun them totally.

8. Get Support

At this stage, you need to identify a set of people that can help accelerate the accomplishment of your desired goal.

For instance, if your goal is to set up your own business and become an entrepreneur, you can meet with business experts and moguls who have succeeded in your target industry.

If you develop good relationship with them, you may be exposed to a lot of tips and hacks that can help straighten your entrepreneurship journey and make you successful.

Also, if your goal is to lose weight, you can discuss with fitness experts as well as overweight people who later become slimmer after certain practices and activities. Their success story might inspire you to accomplish your desired goal.

9. Measure Your Progress

One of the best things that will motivate you to stay persistent in achieving your goals is your current progress.

You need to track how far you have gone with the intended goal and see whether there are still some things that you are not doing well.

Once you notice that things are not going well as planned, you need to think about the major cause, review your current strategy and ruminate on how to best improve on that and also think about new strategies you can employ to set you back on the right path.