Personal development planning is both important and necessary for professional success. Do you feel like personal development planning is difficult and time-consuming? If you do, know that you’re not alone. Many people feel this way.
Fortunately, personal development planning doesn’t have to be difficult. And while you will need to make time for it, it doesn’t have to be time-consuming either! All that’s necessary is for you to have the right attitude and commitment.
1. Be mindful of your goals and intentions
Being content with where you are in your career is a good thing. It’s actually a really great feeling to have. What’s the saying? If you do what you love you’ll never work a day in your life. This is true. Doing what you love never feels like too much work.
However, don’t just decide there’s nothing more for you to do in your professional life just because you’re content with your career. Times keep changing. Where do you want to be in the next 5 years? What skills do you want to develop or maintain? Think about the things you have accomplished and all that you still want to accomplish.
No growth will happen, ever, if you don’t first keep in mind where growth is necessary. So you must keep your goals and intentions in mind.
2. Create a calendar with daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly goals
Oftentimes people get caught up with setting long-term goals. Nothing is wrong with setting long-term goals, but it can be quite overwhelming if you don’t set smaller goals to help you reach that big long-term goal. If not careful, a long-term goal can end up being nothing but a pipe dream. To help, it’s always a good idea to break down the bigger goals into smaller, more manageable chunks.
Create a personal development plan that outlines steps for each long-term goal. Then create daily, weekly, monthly and yearly plans to help you achieve it. You can map out how much time is necessary per day or week in order to accomplish these tasks successfully. This will ensure you take small, effective steps to achieve your personal development goals.
Make sure the goals are S.M.A.R.T.: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-sensitive! This will help keep your personal development planning on track.
3. Make sure to write down your goals in order to keep track of them
Have you ever thought of something amazing and then you forget about it immediately after? Well, you can’t afford for that to happen with your goals. Keep them in mind by writing your personal development plan goals down.
Having an actual physical copy of this document is best because it’s tangible; holding a pen or pencil and physically marking certain goals as complete will make these goals feel extra real to you. Studies have shown that physically writing things down sets your brain to work accomplishing the goals you wrote down.
It’s also important to take time every day, or at least once a week, and review your personal development goals. You can refer back to the document you created to write down your goals. This will give you the opportunity to take note of the progress you have made, or where adjustments are necessary.
4. Set specific deadlines for each goal that you set
Having to meet deadlines isn’t exactly fun. But no one can deny that deadlines are useful. You might be sick of having to meet deadlines and feel no need to set them for your personal growth. However, the extra pressure can help you keep on track with your personal development planning agenda
For personal development planning, deadlines help you measure your progress more accurately. This also helps prevent procrastination because personal growth goals can easily be put off. After all, there’s no client waiting on you, so you can put your goals off whenever you please. Deadlines will encourage accountability by keeping you accountable to yourself, which is necessary for personal improvement to happen!
Every personal development goal should have its own deadline. Make sure you give yourself enough time to achieve this personal growth goal, but not too much that it becomes challenging because of how long the task will take to complete.
Be realistic with your deadlines and keep them achievable! You can always extend a personal development planning goal’s timeline IF necessary.
5. Prioritize the tasks that are most important to you first
Personal development planning is all about prioritizing. You can’t expect to be able to check off all of the items on your personal growth list at once! That’s why you should prioritize what personal goals are most important in order for you to accomplish them first.
Prioritizing will also have you look forward to following through with your personal development plan. As you complete different tasks and goals, you will have an immense feeling of success and progress. Whenever you accomplish something it will be the most important thing at that point in time. This will give you the boost you need to keep going.
6. Schedule time every day for personal development activities
Simply deciding how much time you will spend on your personal development planning goals is simply not enough. Doing this will set you up for continuously pushing your personal development activities aside until you feel like it’s convenient for you. You might constantly call it a day without working on anything for your personal development. You will never accomplish anything that way.
Consistency is key. So in order to give your personal development activities the attention they need, you have to schedule the time for them into your day. After doing so, treat these activities with the same level of importance as everything else you have to do for the day.
This way, personal development planning can be an integral part of your day instead of something you have to squeeze in before you go to bed when you’re tired.
Our Conclusion
You may not think that personal development is necessary in order to achieve success. But, what you might realize after reading this blog post is how important it can be when trying to reach your goals and ambitions. Top Tier Coaching Services has the strategies to teach you all about personal development so that you are prepared for life’s challenges on a daily basis. If anyone knows anything about reaching their goals, it would be us! Contact our team of experts today if you want more insight into how we can help with your self-development activities or coaching needs. We have some great resources available including programs specifically tailored around digital marketing skillsets too! What did YOU learn from this blog post?
