How to create a personal development plan?

I have always been trying to create personal goals to help with my development. However, one of the issues I have faced almost every time is how overwhelming is to select just a few personal objectives and how big and scary it may look at first.

I’m not an expert but I’ll try to break up my thought process on how I create my PDP or set goals in general.

Why to the bottom

Setting up a PDP for yourself is often difficult as we want to do many things and master all areas at work or life. Because of that, we need to take action and adjust ourselves to get the most out of such exercise. The first step I take is to ask myself ‘Where am I now?’.

Break it down

When I understand my current situation, I jump to the next couple of questions:

• What am I good at?
• What do I need to work on?
• What could help me along?
• What could stop me?

Future

Once I have an understanding of myself, skills, weaknesses and so on, I then can focus on the future. You can never go for a run if you don’t look down and see if you have your trainers on. The same goes for setting up personal goals and objectives.

My question after clearing that out is ‘Where do I want to be?’. We ask ourselves such questions very regularly and need to know this, so we are consistent and determined to reach that stage.

However, what many people fail to do is separate their short-term from medium and long-term goals. A big goal for our PDP will normally tend to take a long time but that doesn’t mean that we are not achieving anything in between.

Milestones

Non-negotiable for me, it’s impossible to achieve and succeed at completing a big goal if you don’t set milestones at reaching it. We will give up, we will feel like we are not reaching that goal and we will not enjoy working towards it. This is why I always stick a date and create a timeline for my PDP objectives.

Only then you can keep yourself accountable and see what is not working and make the necessary changes.