Success breeds complacency, having a personal development plan prevents it

A personal development plan is a map of your self development journey. It is basically a goal setting practice, but specifically for the area of personal development. The objective of it is to plan for your aspirations in regards to personal development.

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 have no goals in regards to their personal development.

This is not ideal because as you get more and more caught up in achieving your goals, you will unconsciously neglect learning & improving further. Additionally, when people start seeing success, many get complacent and stop their development. It is this complacency that usually causes many successful individuals to consequently fall back to their previous level.

How does a personal development plan work?

Here’s the gist of having a personal development plan. Everyone works hard towards achieving their goals. Unfortunately, often times many neglect working on what’s most important to their success - THEMSELVES; their skills, abilities, knowledge etc.

In a nutshell, the basic premise of a personal development plan involves ;

1. Identifying where you are right now – What are your strengths, weaknesses etc

2. Identifying where you want or need to be – What needs to be worked on for you to get to the next level. Which weaknesses need to be addressed. What area is to be given priority.

3. Coming up with a plan to fill that gap – identifying resources, scheduling etc.

Though the basic premise of a personal development map seems quite simple, it is important that you spend time and really work on it so that you can come up with a really good and detailed plan. This is important to ensure that you are effectively developing yourself and headed the right direction.

Resources for the creation of your personal development plan

The first thing that you want to do is to learn more about the methods for writing a personal development plan. Things like how to discover your strengths/weaknesses, knowing what to prioritize on etc. Once you are familiar with that you can proceed to create your detailed plan.

Here is a personal development plan template that you can use as a reference to create your own. Just follow the sections in the template and you’ll be on your way. Feel free to make any changes to the template to suit your personal needs if necessary. Though nothing is written in stone, however try to not to lose the essence of the template.

Here is an example personal development plan as a reference. Check this out if you’re having trouble with writing any part of your plan.

Final thoughts...

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 capabilities that ultimately affects your level of success and the quality of your life. So don’t neglect it.