How to write the best personal development plan ever
What is a PDP?
A Personal Development plan (or PDP) is a document that helps you identify your goals and how to reach them. But what should you include in a personal development plan? Keep reading to find out more.
What Should a Personal Development Plan Include?
A great personal learning plan should include your goals on how to reach your vision and steps on how to achieve each of the goals. It should be a clear path to success that will help you grow your skillset and prevent you from moving backwards. Having a clear vision is vitally important – to help you identify your personal vision, take a look at our blog post here.
The best personal development plans also include strategies for getting back on track if things do go wrong, allowing you to feel confident in achieving your goals.
How Do You Write a Personal Development Plan?
Writing a personal development plan has seven main steps. To help you get started, read our advice below, using this as a development planning template.
1. Identify your goals
The first step to writing your personal development plan is to identify your long-term goals that link to your vision. These goals will be intimidating at first as they are so big, but it is important to know what they are so that you can break them down into smaller, more manageable steps to try and achieve them. To help find goals that link to your vision, take a look at our blog post here for some great advice.
2. Prioritise those goals.
Next, it is important to think about the smaller steps that you will take to reach these bigger goals. These smaller steps should then be prioritised in order of importance and urgency.
3. Consider Deadlines
Identifying a time frame in which you would like to achieve each of your smaller goals is important in helping motivate you. The time frame should be realistic, however, so as not to discourage you. To come up with realistic time frames, speak to others who have already achieved these goals and see how long it took them to complete the process.
4. Identify Threats
There will be things that come up that will delay your deadline or try and prevent you from achieving your goals. It is important to identify these threats and come up with ways to try and avoid or overcome these. This will help you develop more resilience, ensuring that you do not get up the minute things become difficult.
5. Develop Your Skillset
Now that you have a plan on how to tackle threats, you can now focus on the smaller actions that you can do to achieve your goals. Look into course that you can take, or how you can practice developing your skills.
6. Rely on Your Support Network
Even though a personal development plan contains personal goals, you do not need to do everything yourself. It is important to find a support network that will help motivate you and give you advice. You are more likely to succeed if you have friends, family or colleagues around you that support your goals.
7. Measure your Progress
It is important to keep track of your achievements to evaluate your progress. This should also be done after a setback in order for you to re-focus and re-motivate yourself.
Conclusion
Creating a personal development plan is a long and detailed process, however, it can produce some fantastic results – improving your life and allowing you to reach your goals. A great way how to start thinking about your future is to get to know yourself better. If you are looking for some help with this, you can try Growmon – our app that will give you valuable insights about your personality, strengths, interests and areas where you can focus your development and use it as the baseline for your personal development plan. Try it here.