Transformational Leadership. Social Entrepreneurship

Every Wednesday, we will feature a four or five-part series on personal development and/or leadership. This is the fifth and final installment of the Ignite Yourself series.

A personal development plan does not need to be too complicated. The main purpose of your personal development plan is to guide you in achieving your personal vision and ambition. It doesn’t hurt to be too ambitious but you also need to be realistic. Here are five tips to consider when you are writing your personal development plan.

1. Keep your personal vision in mind.

If you were a tree, then your vision would be your roots. Any plan for yourself should be rooted in your vision. Otherwise, you will end up toiling for all the wrong reasons and all the wrong directions. Better start with your vision now than regret your directions later in life.

2. Consider your present situation and your potentials.

Don’t just brag about your potential, you need to consider where you are now. You might be in a difficult situation, you might be in poverty right now or you might feel like a complete loser. But if you consider your potentials, your life may be infused with new energy and you can pursue your passion and live a meaningful life! Potentials give us hope. And hope gives us power to try and attempt great things. You may fail in the process but the hope is still there.

Your hopes and your dreams are powerful fuel for your journey. If you use them right, you can easily be on your way to achieving your vision.

3. Consult your significant others.

You may be a wonderfully talented individual and you may believe that you can conquer a lot of things alone. Yet, you can only see and do so much if you are alone. Better consult your spouse, your parents, your siblings and your friends about what they think of you and your plan. Your plans may not be fully formed yet, but as you ask them about what they think of you, you can also gain significant insight.

If you are married, your plans would naturally involve your spouse. Other people can also point out some flaws in your line of thinking. Don’t ignore those arguments. Don’t allow them to discourage you either. If it’s any consolation, such criticisms and arguments could help you refine your ideas and make you more confident on your chosen path.

4. Devote enough time in planning for your life.

Planning cannot be done overnight! It takes time. If you can spare a weekend off, you should go to a quiet place where you can think undisturbed and really project yourself into the future and iron out the problems in your plan. You can call it your personal development retreat! Corporations put a premium on their planning sessions. You should too! After all, a haphazard plan may lead to more harm than good.

5. Keep your plan SMART.

The acronym SMART has been repeated for so many times already. Yet, we keep forgetting what it stands for.

Simple. A plan should be simple for you to implement it properly. What use would a complicated plan be? It would just get you confused on how you will implement it.

Measurable. It wouldn’t do to simply say I will become a famous man! You should specify some means of how to measure your success. In some business circles, this would be called the success indicators. If you want to be rich, specify by how much! If you want to have a successful website, specify how you would measure success.

Attainable. If you plan to beat Bill Gates’ billions of dollars, you better make sure you have the capacity to do that without killing yourself. Aiming for the sky is good if you have a plane! But if all you have is a motorcycle, then work with that. In time, you’ll have the means to aim for the sky.

You should also aim for something that will challenge you to exert more and achieve more. If your aim is too low, why aim in the first place?

Realistic. In the previous chapters, you’ve learned to assess your present situation. Make sure that your plan is rooted in your present situation and that you’ll work at making things better until you are at the level you aimed for.

Time-bound. You should aim for something that can be attained within your lifetime. If you aim for world peace, chances are, you won’t be around anymore when it happens. So better specify the time that you want to achieve your dreams and work on that.

A Five-Year Personal Development Plan

For simplicity and manageability, you should start by creating a five-year personal development plan. It’s simple to create and you learn a lot about yourself. This will be a simple plan and you can modify it any way you want, anytime you want.

1. List down what you want to achieve for yourself in seven areas: Physical, Financial, Career, Mental, Academic, Social and Spiritual. These areas are arbitrary. You can add to these categories if needed.

2. For each activity or goal you listed down in each of the seven areas, specify the month and year when you want to achieve that.

3. You also need to list down your strategies for achieving the goals you have listed down. This is similar to writing your New Year’s Resolution. But it’s not the New Year and these are not just resolutions. These are actual plans that you will implement for yourself.

4. Think of the cost of achieving each activity. It’s not only monetary cost! Take into account the time you need as well as the different costs that you’ll have to pay for each goal. Remember the dictum of difficult trainings: No Pain! No Gain!

You’ll actually do better if you put your plan in a table. You can easily view each area of your life, what your goals are and when you will achieve them.

Treat your five-year personal development plan sacred. As if your very life depended on this plan. This will help you keep focus in working out your plan. A plan is only as good as your intention to keep it. A plan, if not followed, will not help you.

image credit: limonada via Flickr

Related posts:

1. Ignite Yourself: A Call to Personal Development Journey
2. How to Prepare Your Personal Strategic Plan
3. Evaluate Yourself
4. How to Do a Personal Inventory