Personal development planning: Recipe for success

A personal development plan offers a great way to ensure that each job role and experience feels more meaningful, offers you a purpose and gives you an amazing insight into the future and is excellent for developing an efficient long-term perspective within your career.

Firstly, the definition of a personal development planning is “the process of creating an action plan based on awareness, values, reflection, goal-setting, and planning for personal development within the context of a career, education, relationship or for self-improvement.” In the terms we’re looking at within this article will be focused on improving your career and employability, but there are of course many other ways a personal development plan can be crucial.

A lot of people have a clear plan in their head where they’d like to be, though putting that into a plan that is actionable, has targets and drives you towards a goal? That can be enlightening.

There are many benefits of setting goals within your professional and personal life. Some of these being:

• More organised thoughts.
• Higher chances of success.
• Allows for more introspection and self-reflection.
• More positive feeling about your current employment or situation.
• Help identifying current and future needs, which allows you to see the long-term perspective.

Furthermore, if used in the context of your own life and career, the results can be riveting.

Here are some tips on creating your own personal development plan:

Set SMART goals

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time.

Increase your level of self-awareness
Self-awareness is crucial to any personal development planning. Without it you are sure to fail, your plan consistently changing and adapting to the new ideas you come up with. You need to be definite in your approach to planning your future, and self-awareness allows you to know what you truly want, and find a way to work towards it.

Take real action
I feel this is the most crucial point of the whole topic. Upon setting a plan you should make sure they have actionable steps that you can take in order to achieve your goal, then do it. You could have a million plans, each of them as huge as the next, but without action, they’ll never manifest into reality.

Carl Rogers said that in order to achieve a true feeling of congruence within our lives, our ideal-self much closely match the reality of our actions and behaviours. How can you act differently today to further enhance your journey to fulfilment, achievement, and purpose? One change is all it could take.