6.6 minute read
At the start of the year, most of us feel like we haven’t accomplished much, and a lot of things left behind. However, here’s another year that will start. Another opportunity that will allow us to accomplish the unaccomplished stuff. This time, we’ll not do it like in the past years, it will be different. We’ll create a Personal development plan.
What is a personal development plan?
“The PDP (personal development plan) usually includes a statement of one’s aspirations, strengths or competencies, education and training, and stages or steps to indicate how the plan is to be realized. Personal development plans may also include a statement of one’s career and lifestyle priorities, career positioning, analysis of opportunities and risks, and alternative plans (Plan, and a curriculum vitae (CV).” Somehow, reading that seems like it will take so much of our time, effort, and a lot of planning. Do not fret! It’s just actually easy.
Identify key areas of your life
For me, I call my plan the Refresh Plan. It’s easy to remember. Just look at your keyboard and look at the refresh button which is F5. The 5 F’s or the 5 key areas of my life plan are Finance, Fitness, Faith, Future, and Family. You can actually create your own if you want but for the sake of this discussion, we’ll use a key area of the Refresh Plan as an example.
Once the key areas of improvement/development have been decided, for every key area, we have to create a mission statement.
Why do we need to have a mission statement? 
It is actually for us to easily remember what we want to accomplish. Remember during elementary times, we say a pledge to our country at every flag ceremony. That’s actually reminding us what our duties and responsibilities of being a citizen. This is the same with our personal mission statement. We remind ourselves of how we improve ourselves.
Here’s a sample. For my finance area, my mission statement is “To be able to live a comfortable life being debt-free and not worry about expenses by doing proper financial planning”. In that statement, there are two important components:
1. Problem/Area of improvement
2. Action to resolve the issue
In the first place, we created the personal development plan because we have a problem that we need to resolve. Since we have written the problem, it is actually us acknowledging it that it is a problem. Sometimes, we fail because we focus on the wrong outlook. Like if we want to lose weight, we have to acknowledge the fact that there is a need to be healthy not just lose weight. We are sometimes too focused on just wanting to lose weight and we lose track of the idea that the end goal is to be healthy, losing weight is the result. Without a proper end goal, the action’s meaning will be easily forgotten.
Going back to my statement, the problem that I have is debt and inconsistent financial planning. Knowing that these are my issues, I could then create an action plan for the year. I’ll create a plan on how I can pay all of my debts with the current resources I have. Since I’m doing that, I would create also a systematic way of doing my finances every month. If I can have a proper system, the only thing to do next is to execute. Once I’ve already identified my issues and solutions, it would look like this in the end.
FINANCE – To be able to live a comfortable life being debt-free and not worry about expenses by doing proper financial planning
Actionable items:
– Current debt is $XXXX.00 – Set aside X amount every month for the next 6 months to pay off debt
– Create a budget for the month that includes the debt payment
I’ll not go deeper with the actionable items since there are a lot of resources on how we can tackle different kinds of issues. This will go the same way with the other key areas of our lives.
Do note that we have to limit our actionable items to 2 or 3 items. Best actually if you have only one actionable item for each key area. This is to ensure that we don’t have so much stuff to do that it would overwhelm us. The purpose of the Refresh Plan is to guide us accordingly and it helps us have a framework for how we live our lives. Knowing the key areas that we need to improve, all our actions will be in line with our mission statements. This was the thing that made us fail the past years, we had little to no framework on how we go about improving ourselves.
The best time to create a personal development plan is now. The only thing that we need to do is execute and live the plan.
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