Benefits of Personal Development
Personal development is a crucial part of life; it’s what gets you from being that awkward teen full of mistakes to the wise adult you are today. But how do you know where you stand in your personal development? How do assess whether you need to work on it harder or keep on the path you’re already on? Many people don’t know where they stand with their personal development. They don’t know how to tell if they’re staying on track or if they’ve wandered off the path.
In this article, we’re going to explore personal development and help you identify if you need to work on it.
Do you make decisions for yourself?
One of the first ways to tell if you need to revisit your personal development or not is by analyzing how you make decisions. Do you make them for yourself or do you rely heavily on the thoughts and opinions of others?
There’s a difference between getting the advice and input of others on decisions you made and relying on others to make the decision for you. The first is a reasonable course of action for anyone making a big or heavy decision. The second, however, is a sign that you’re not going well on your path to personal development.
Do you like yourself?
This is the most important first question that you could possibly ask yourself when it comes to personal development. Personal development is all about you; it doesn’t matter what others think about you.
If you don’t like yourself, your personal development is not going in the right direction or has stagnated. The whole point of personal development is to make you into the person you want to be that you like.
If you answered no to this question, ask yourself these follow-up questions to help you identify where you went wrong and what you need to adjust and correct:
● What specifically about yourself do you not like?
● What small action each day would help change that?
● What goal can you set for yourself that, once achieved, would help you like yourself more?
● Why do you think it is that you don’t like yourself?
● What major change would need to take place for you to like yourself?
From here, you can develop a plan and course of action to help rectify this problem and get you on the right track to personal development.
Do you feel like you have a solid inner core of values and principles?
Morality is subjective, but it’s important that you stay true to your own moral compass. If you feel like there’s something shady in your beliefs or practices, you need to work on it to get back on track for positive personal development.
This question of reflecting on your inner core of values and principles will help you practice analyzing your behaviors, decisions, and actions on a daily basis. We recommend asking yourself this while meditating, allowing yourself to closely examine your whole day in great detail. This will help you more closely see where you need to adjust to continue with personal development and become the person you want to be.
Are you pleased with the decisions you’ve made?
Part of personal development involves your happiness. You need to at the very least make peace with the person you have been and then be happy with the person you’re becoming, and the life you’re choosing to lead. All of your efforts towards personal development mean absolutely nothing if you’re not happy.
Take time regularly to reflect on your life and all the decisions you’ve made along the way. Are you happy with the career path you’ve chosen? Does the life you’ve built for yourself so far make you happy? Does the person you are make you happy? If there was one decision you could make that would make you happier, what would it be?
How do others view you and react to you?
While it’s important that your motivations for personal development lie within yourself, part of how we judge who we are as people is against those around us. We use their reactions to our behavior and their opinions of us to help us judge how we view ourselves.
Sometimes we choose to throw these judgments out, like if we find the source to not be credible, but others we take them into consideration to either be proud of where we are or make adjustments.
Where do you want to go?
While it’s important to not focus solely on your desired end result and enjoy the journey, it’s still important to have a loose goal in mind. You want to know what you’re working towards, but you don’t want to have a hard cut off point. The whole point of personal development is that it’s a life-long journey of self discovery. You are the only person you will be in relationship with your whole life. You might as well get to know yourself!
If you have a hard goal and don’t keep yourself open to expanding beyond that, your personal development will stagnate at that point. You won’t keep growing and developing, you’ll simply peak. It’s important to make goals and achieve them, but don’t stop once you get them, make a new goal.
What accomplishments toward personal development have you made so far?
While you don’t want to focus exclusively on your goals, you do need to measure your progress in some way to make sure you know if you’re on the right track or not. Spend some time reflecting on your personal development thus far.
What goals have you set for yourself? Have you accomplished them? What goals do you still have for yourself? Are you close to achieving any of them? Determining the answers to these questions will help you to assess if you need to work to improve your personal development or not.
Why should you assess your need for personal development?
As we said before, personal development is a crucial part of life. It’s what helps to make you the best person you possibly can be. Taking the time to assess your need for personal development helps keep you on track and gets you to the good person you want to be. It helps you take stock of your behavior, actions, and decisions and make sure that you’re being the person you want to be.
Personal development is an important part of life, but it doesn’t just happen. It’s something you actively have to work at to improve and keep track of your progress so you can keep up what’s working and cut out what’s not. As you assess your personal development, consider how you can work to improve your personal development and achieve your desired results.
5 Key Steps To A Personal Development Plan
A personal development plan, like any other sort of self-improvement plan, is a plan you put into place to encourage and guide you through your personal development. This plan will help you track your progress and ensure you’re achieving all the goals you set out to achieve.
1. Set goals
You can’t construct any sort of self-improvement plan without setting goals. The goals for your personal development plan should be related to personal growth. Whenever you set goals for yourself, you have to be sure that they are achievable and that you give yourself a deadline. This will ensure you actually achieve them in a timely manner.
Examples of goals
● Developing and sticking to a positive sleep routine for a month
● Wake up at 6 am and workout every day
● Learn about balanced nutrition and plan meals
2. Track your progress
Tracking your progress is essential to see what’s working and what’s not, knowing where you stand in your personal development, and keeping yourself motivated. Rewarding yourself for achieving your goals can be excellent motivation to keep you working towards the next one. It can also help to keep you on the right track along your path to self-improvement.
3. Be open to change
If you’re going to construct a personal development plan and actually take it on, you’ll have to be open to change. Sometimes you won’t make as much progress as you had hoped you would and other times you’ll make way more; you have to be flexible and willing to go with the flow. You have to change your plans to make it work for you as you go.
4. Cut yourself some slack
You’re human; you’re going to mess up and fall off the path every now and again. You have to cut yourself some slack and be willing to forgive yourself for your shortcomings. Learn from the mistakes, forgive yourself, let it go, and move forward. The longer you get hung up on it, the more time you waste that could be spent making you a better person and working on your personal development.
5. Keep a journal
Journaling can help you more closely track your progress as you work your way along this journey, and identify any problems in your behavior, actions, or decisions. Journaling can make it easier for you to recount what you do throughout the day so you can better assess your behavior to make adjustments when necessary.
You can read back over your journal later to more accurately analyze what went on during a particular time, refresh your mind of decisions you made, and remember what mistakes you’ve made and the lessons you’ve learned from them. It can help you keep tabs on your progress as you go.
If you want to work on your personal development, the best thing to do is make a plan. If you stick to your plan and follow our few key steps, you’ll be set up for success. The road to personal development is a long and arduous one, but the benefits are far more than worth it. Stay the course and reap your many benefits.
We hope this article has inspired you to develop your very own personal development plan and work to improve yourself. The harder you work to improve yourself the better the results will be.
