There comes a point when you have to realize that you’ll never be good enough for some people. The question is, is that your problem or theirs?
Personal development is a lifelong process. It is a way for people to assess their skills and qualities, consider their aims in life and set goals to realize and maximize their potential. For anyone to be successful in any phase of their life, be it their career, community or organization, they need to be able to lead effectively. This will lead you to success, but for a person to be a great leader, they need to have developed themselves. Personal development is not something that you ‘do’, but something that slowly becomes your nature, an integral part of you.
Following are the top 5 steps for managing your Personal Development.
Developing a Personal Vision and setup Goal
A vision here means a picture of what and where you want to be in life. You might think of this as identifying what success looks like for you in work, in your personal life, or perhaps in sport and hobbies. This vision is a vital step on the way to identifying your personal development needs, and then taking action to address them.
Each of us has different ambitions and things that we want to achieve and to get out of life. For this reason, it is unhelpful to compare your achievements to others, or to consider others as ‘unsuccessful’ because they have not achieved what you want to achieve. However high others may reach in life or careers, you also have no way of judging whether they consider their own lives a success
“When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace. I believe I have made that effort and that is, therefore, why I will sleep for the eternity.” – Nelson Mandela
As well as success being personal, there are many ways in which it could be defined and measured – fame, fortune, recognition, personal integrity, discovering something new to the world, or even just doing your job to the best of your ability. People want to know that they have achieved, or have the ability to achieve, something of value, meaning or importance. It is important to set yourself clear goals if you wish to achieve your ambitions. Goals help us to focus on what we want to be or where we want to go with our lives. They can be a way of utilizing knowledge, and managing time and resources, so that you can focus on making the most of your life potential.
By setting clearly defined goals, you can measure your achievements and keep sight of your progress. If you fail to achieve at one step you can reassess your situation and try new approaches. Keeping your life goals clearly defined and updated as your circumstances change and evolve is one of the most powerful ways to keep yourself motivated throughout life.
You can make your goals by following the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timed) criteria. You have to review your goals regularly, perhaps every few months, and certainly every year, to make sure that the goals are still relevant to what you want to achieve; and you are on track to achieve them. If not, you need to revise them, in line with your current situation.
If you are ready to accelerate your personal growth and start making the changes you’ve promised yourself, you must start with one goal. Be specific, be clear, be concise, and set a realistic time frame for completion.
Your vision is your guide to developing your personal strategy.
Planning your Personal Development
Once you are clear about where you want to be, you can start planning how to get there. Drawing up a personal development plan is not essential, but it does make the planning process more realistic. Personal development can be a matter of being in the right place at the right time, and simply taking up opportunities. But consistent, effective Personal Development across a wide range of skills requires deliberate and focused effort to achieve your goals and ambitions in life, whether career-focused or more personal.
The reason for planning your Personal Development is therefore very simple – only you know what you want to achieve, and the key to achieving it is in your hands via the actions you take. Planning what you need to do to achieve your goals is a vital step in the process.
There are several things that you need to include in a personal development plan:
- A clear vision of where you want to be and why
- A good understanding of the skills you need to develop to achieve your vision
- A clear idea of the standard you need to achieve, and how different that is from your current standard
- A level of priority for each area
- A detailed idea of how to get from where you are now for each skills or area, to where you want to be
You may find this point rather overwhelming! But it is important to bear two things in mind:
- You do have skills. You have been learning and developing all your life, and you already have several skills. It is often important that you can identify and give examples of the transferable skills that you have developed – this will go a long way to persuading prospective employers that you are right for the job
- You don’t have to improve everything all at once. In fact, you’re much better off not trying to do that. Focus on just one or two areas at a time, and you will see much larger improvements, and feel less overwhelmed.
There is a reason why personal development is sometimes called ‘lifelong learning’. There is no time limit on it.
Starting the Improvement Process
You need to identify your strengths and weaknesses to start the Improvement Process. There are some techniques that you can use to start to address problems and challenges, and bring about personal changes. There are several ways in which you can start to work on areas of weakness.
- Formal courses or learning opportunities, whether leading to qualifications or not
- More informal learning experiences such as reading, mentoring or shadowing
- Applying your formal learning deliberately in a specific situation, to see what happens
- Direct learning from your own experience, through a process of reflection and expertise transfer.
Which you choose, and when, will depend on many factors, including financial implications, because formal courses and qualifications usually cost money, and the value that you think you are likely to get out of them.
One of the most powerful ways to learn and develop is from making mistakes. While nobody would advocate deliberately setting out to do things wrong, mistakes happen to everyone, especially if you are prepared to take risks and try something new. You can either treat mistakes as things to be muted up and never spoken about again, or as learning opportunities. Making mistakes gives you a chance to do things wrong, and then reflect about how you could and/or should have done them differently; and if you are lucky, uncover real truths about good ways of working and improve relationships.
The key is to recognize what will work for you, and to make sure that you do not focus on just one option. Variety is, after all, the spice of life, and this applies to personal development too.
Recording Your Personal Development
Recording your personal achievements and movement towards personal development goals may seem unnecessary. You might think that you will not forget, and therefore there is no need to make a record. But having a record of what you have done is important for several reasons. The main reason for keeping a record of your achievements is to be able to demonstrate them to a potential employer. They are effectively a proof that you can manage the requirements of a new job. Many job applications and interview processes nowadays are competence-based. This means that you will probably be asked to give examples of times when you have used and demonstrated the skills required for the job. A record of your personal achievements is vital in doing so.
Reviewing your achievements, and recording them, is also a way to check your progress against your goals. If you never record your goals and achievements, you have no way of seeing how you have grown over time. It is therefore worth taking the time to reflect at least once a year (and preferably slightly more often) on your personal development, and progress towards your goals.
In this process, you should:
- Review your goals and make an honest assessment of your progress towards them
- Review your achievements over the period
- Review what you have learned
- Make a note of your review
As well as an annual review, it is a good idea to keep a record of your main achievements, the things of which you are particularly proud, because you feel that you did them very well, or they were especially hard to do, and other people might not have managed. These will form the basis of any job application, so it is a good idea to take time over this element of your record.
When you have a reasonable list of achievements, together with the skills you used, you may want to take this a step further, and start to list your skills and personal qualities, together with evidence (usually your achievements, but also your qualifications).
Reviewing your achievements is also helpful if you are finding life a bit tough. It reminds you of what you have achieved, and what you can do again, and may just give you the impetus to go out and get that new job.
Reviewing and Revising Personal Development Plans
Once you have planned your development, you can then go on to develop the skills that you have identified. But even that is not the end of the process, because it is important to review and evaluate your development.
This reflective process has two main purposes:
- To check that you have followed your development plan; and
- To ensure that your planned development has helped you towards your goals
You may also find that your goals are no longer valid, and you want to update them. A regular review process can therefore lead to you revising both your goals, and your planned development activities, to ensure that they take you where you want to go.
Every year or so, it is also likely to be helpful to review your personal development goals. As with the review of your planned activity, it is important to set time aside for this process. Again, it is also helpful to document it, because this forces you to articulate your reasoning. Ask yourself if these goals really required to achieve more than anything else? Do they inspire you to take action? If the answer to either of those is ‘NO’, then you probably have the wrong goals.
Reviewing your plans and goals on a regular basis ensures that you set aside time for reflection, and hopefully, that you start to document your thinking and progress on personal development
Conclusion
The Personal Development plan is very important in enabling the tracking of developmental changes that are necessary for the achievement of goals. Planning is very important since it provides a medium for a person to set goals and decide how they will have to be achieved. Personal development plan extends beyond academic fulfillment and is more significantly a plan that explains something about the entire person, not just how perfect you were confining yourself in a quiet place.
Remember, though there is no rush. There is a reason why personal development is sometimes called ‘lifelong learning’…
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