GET THE PLAYBOOK

THE BLOG

Personal Development Plan

You can read all of the self-help books that you want, but if you don’t have a personal development plan, then nothing will change. You can consume all of the information that you want, but unless you’re applying it, you probably won’t get very far.

The good news is that you can apply a personal development plan to just about any area of your life. You can work on your happiness, you can focus on being more present, or you can have personal development goals for work.

I can’t give you an exact personal development plan because I don’t know what you want to work on exactly. You may want to get over your fears, work on self-love, or just finally break some limiting beliefs.


Here is a free exercise that can help give you some direction: 

 https://www.deldenney.com/p/achieve-balance


There’s not really a specific place to start because everything ties in together. Maybe you want to work on self-love, but you can’t because you have limiting beliefs. You might want to get over your fears, but you have bad habits that don’t let you cross any lines.

The first step to any good personal development plan is to set good (and smart) goals that are clear and allow you to take the appropriate action steps to kick some serious butt.

Personal development goals for work or for yourself all require CLARITY.

If you don’t have this crucial key, then you’re not clear as to what you’re aiming toward. It’s easy to not follow the steps you need when you don’t have clarity.

  1. You need to be clear about your goals
  2. You need to have specificity

These two things will give you something real and (practically) tangible to work toward. The questions for your personal development plan are:

How do you get clear about your goals, and how specific should you get?

To find clarity, you need a good one-to-one talk with yourself. You need to go somewhere quiet, take out a piece of paper, and figure out what it is that you want most for yourself.

There are probably a lot of things that you want to improve because we always want to be better people, but just think: if you could be any type of person right now (for yourself) what kind of person would you be?

Pick 3 to 5 words that describe this person.

Examples:

Kind, present, unstoppable, positive, inspiring, focused, light, patient, happy, more self-caring, more self-loving, independent.

Don’t give it too much thought. Write down whatever you want. Once you’ve done this small and easy exercise, believe it or not, you have clarity. You know what you want!

 

Next in your personal development plan is figuring out how to get there. This is where you get specific with your action steps. Pick 5 things that you know you need to become the person that you want to become.

 Let me give another example:

Say that you want to be a more focused person. Here would be your action steps:

  • Get into the habit of leaving my phone in another room turned off
  • Watch a course about how to stop procrastinating (follow every step)
  • Work on being more present in general - Find something new in every place I visit
  • Read a book about how to work smarter (not harder) and apply the most impactful steps

Figure out what gets me to focus more (ie. listening to music, turning on the tv, working at a coffee shop, etc.) 

Do this for every word you choose, but don’t strive to become all three at once. Just do one at a time (3 months one, 3 months the next, and so on).

Planning a plan is easy, it’s the doing that’s hard, but I know you can do this. Just remember who you want to become, and let that motivate you! 

View The Entire Collection

See all the blog posts on personal growth, business, and designing a life you love.

EXPLORE NOW