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You absolutely made a wise decision to discover why personal development should be a priority. Your personal development should be a priority because it gives you a boost in your confidence. Sure, you might be less confident in some aspects of your work but once you have achieved a goal, you will feel very accomplished because you gained another skill.
During your life, you’ve developed a few ideas and even formed some beliefs and established values around those ideas. Sometimes those ideas are simply wrong. They may feel right due to your own experience in life thus far, but often, they are very subjective and not an actual indicator that everyone will experience the same thing. Sometimes fears develop that can cause roadblocks on your path to success.
One thing that can get in the way of success is sticking to comfort zones. If you’ve never gotten up in front of a group and talked to them about what you know, how do you really know you dislike and fear public speaking? A Personal Development Plan (PDP) can help you take steps to work on your fear, such as by joining a speakers’ group or hiring a coach.
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Purpose of a PDP
Personal development is a process that you will work on for your entire life. It will help you assess your skills, and qualities, and will help you build the lifestyle and life that you envision that you desire for happiness and high quality of life. The personal development plan can help you with all aspects of your life and help you become more self-aware at home and at work.
As children, many people were taught that focusing on yourself was seen as being selfish and they believed it. It’s understandable that they believed it because ‘self’ is part of the word selfish. The latter word means, “…lacking consideration for others.” The good news is that self-improvement is not selfish. On the contrary, self-improvement is good for you and society.
Self-discovery, development, and improvement need to be a rite of passage for all adults simply because it’s so helpful and, simply put, develops valuable people. Plus, the benefits of continuous lifelong self-improvement are all the reasons you need to prioritize self-improvement.
Perform a SWOT on Your Life
A well-designed personal development plan will address your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and roadblocks or threats in all areas of your life that you develop. Your plan will identify your strengths so that you can improve them, your weaknesses so that you can make up for them, and new opportunities, so you know when a door (or window) is open, as well as noting any roadblocks or threats along the way.
Builds Your Confidence
With a good personal development plan, you’re going to go swimming with the sharks first thing (unless that’s your jam), but you will slowly collect successes that will energize you to keep going. As you experience more joy in life, your confidence will become stronger and enable you to let go of some fears. If you don’t have a heart attack giving that talk at Toast Masters, you probably won’t have a heart attack at that meeting.
Recognize Development Areas
When you perform your SWOT in each area of your life, you will discover internal and external things that are blocking your success. For example, you may hold the belief you’ll never have enough money to save for the future. Because of that, when you do get “extra” money, you tend to blow it right away on all the things you feel you missed out on before. This is a limiting belief about money that a lot of people have because most people think money is a finite resource when it’s not. It’s manmade. Therefore, we can make more.
Clarify Your Vision
As you plan your personal development, it helps to envision what you want your future to look like. Some people find it helpful to write their obituary and mention each area of their life, as they want it to be. They need to think of it as if they got everything they ever wanted, and all their dreams came true.
Part of documenting your plan requires explaining the missing elements to arrive at the goal. For example, if your vision includes being happy and in good health; however, you eat burgers every day and never exercise. You need to be realistic to be effective.
Enhance Your Strengths
An effective self-development plan focuses on strengths over weaknesses. It’s not that you will ignore your weaknesses. You won’t. You can outsource, delegate, automate, and learn anything you want to learn. However, it’s far more efficient to focus on what you’re naturally good at and like to do.
Your personal development plan requires you to perform a SWOT analysis for each area of your life to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that may exist. Therefore, if you focus on your strengths, you’ll be far more successful because it feels so good.
Find Your Purpose
One of the problems most of us have is not being self-aware. It’s hard sometimes to look to ourselves to find out how we can personally change to improve our career, work, business, relationships, and so forth. When you become aware that something, you’re doing is making things happen the way they are, you can take control of it.
For example, if you go to networking events and never meet anyone, why? Are you sitting at the same table, with the same people? Did you go to the event with a plan? The self-development plan will address this because the moment you know about the event, you’re going to do a SWOT, and you’re going to figure out how to dominate that networking event
As you set goals and determine why you desire that goal, the process will lead you to discover your purpose. It may not be your life purpose because that may change as you learn and grow. However, it can supply you with a reason to keep looking for your life purpose. The continued search gives you the energy to keep going. Of course, your reasons may differ for at each stage of life and area of your life. The principal factor is that the planning will explain why as you take each step toward the goal.
Improve Your Mental Health
It feels good to understand yourself. For example, knowing why you are afraid of loud sounds can help you deal with your feelings when you hear loud sounds. Being self-aware enough to note problems with your mental health will also make it more likely that you stay healthy because you will be more likely to seek professional help if you need it. If there is one thing personal development does well is to keep you self-aware.
Ensures You Confront Your Fears
Some fears are smart. For example, there is no reason to run around at night walking into dark areas of town in most places. The fear you have about that is protecting you. However, if you have a fear of judgment, you might never get that product in your shopping cart ready for sale. Your lack of confidence has caused a fear of failure, and you tend not to get things done, but you have lots of ideas. An excellent personal development plan will ensure you realize this is happening consciously and allow you to create steps to combat that fear.
It will also help you redefine what it means to be fearless. It’s not as cut and dried as you think. It also might not even be necessary. You can feel fear and act anyway.
Your personal development plan will help you overcome your fears because it was designed to help you think differently. A personal development plan helps you become more self-aware to notice what you can do differently to achieve your goals, including overcoming fears.
Build Better Relationships
One of the most shocking aspects of creating a self-development plan is how much it can help relationships. When you realize that you only control your own behavior and actions, it starts to get easier to manage relationships. Treating them how you want to be treated is an excellent start but becoming self-aware enough to go farther and realize that not everyone likes what you like so you may need to treat someone the way they like to be treated instead.
Learning what your thoughts and feelings mean to you and how your actions affect others goes a long way toward building super-strong relationships. Whether friends or family managing your emotions and moderating your behavior turns you into someone viewed as safe and stable. In addition, being someone trustworthy helps others bond with you more.
Helps You Develop Plan B
Everyone must start with an assumption, and often they are wrong. You do your best research, and you act with confidence, but it’s still wrong. A personal development plan is going to help you identify areas that need a plan B to avoid any problems and bottlenecks for anything you want to accomplish.
You may do some work that helps you look at the resource you have available to do a specific task. For example, if you decide you want to start a coaching business, what resources do you have to start it? What things do you need, what things can you live without, what can you do yourself, and what does someone else need to do? This works in every single aspect of your life.
You may realize you already have all the skills inside to do exactly what you wanted to do. However, you may realize that you need to pay for additional brainpower (resources).
Notes Any Progress You’ve Made
Because you don’t just create your plan once and end it, it’s an ongoing process, you will want to periodically go through any plan you’ve created and note that you did it so that you can move on to a new plan. When you acknowledge your success and even study your failures, you will be that much more ready to experience success again.
Make Personal Development A Priority
Finally, just knowing for sure what you want and how you’ll get it makes all the difference when you get it. It’s so much easier to schedule your life in a balanced way when you’re honest about what it takes to do the things you’ve scheduled yourself to do.
Personal development helps you define your personal vision and life goals more clearly. When you establish targets for yourself, it becomes easier to create a plan and work towards those objectives.
Whatever you want to work on can be done via the personal development plan. Whether you want to lose weight, start a business, change jobs, or go back to school – the goal doesn’t matter as much as developing the plan that you need to get where you want to go. Your plan will not be the same as anyone else’s because you are different. That’s why it’s so consequential and unique because it’s just for you.
Claiming these benefits is as easy as starting on your self-improvement journey today by setting your intention by beginning to create your self-development plan. The sooner you begin your journey of self-discovery, the sooner you can start taking massive action on realizing all your dreams.
