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Do You Need a Personal Development Plan?

In my last post I looked at the importance of understanding our own core values and beliefs in order to focus on areas for development. I now want to start to take a look at how we formalise our own development. Do you really need a Personal Development Plan? If we consider that Personal Development is a process that you will work on for your entire life then, to me at least, it makes sense to have a plan for how you are going to approach it!

What is the Purpose of a Personal Development Plan?

It will help you assess your skills, qualities, and will help you build the lifestyle and life that you envision that you desire for happiness and a high quality of life. The personal development plan can help you with all aspects of your life and help you become more self-aware at home and at work.

Perform a SWOT on Your Life

A well-designed personal development plan will address your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and roadblocks or threats in all areas of your life that you develop. Your plan will identify your strengths so that you can improve them, your weaknesses are so that you can make up for them, and new opportunities, so you know when a door (or window) is open, as well as noting any roadblocks or threats along the way.

Recognise Development Areas

When you perform your SWOT in each area of your life, you will discover internal and external things that are blocking your success. For example, you may hold the belief you’ll never have enough money to save for the future. Because of that, when you do get “extra” money, you tend to blow it right away on all the things you feel you missed out on before. This is a limiting belief about money that a lot of people have because most people think money is a finite resource when it’s not. It’s manmade. Therefore, we can make more.

Identify Your Resources

You may do some work that helps you look at the resource you have available to do a specific task. For example, if you decide you want to start a coaching business, what resources do you have to start it. What things do you need, what things can you live without, what can you do yourself, what does someone else need to do. This works in every single aspect of your life. You may realize you already have all the skills inside to do exactly what you wanted to do. However, you may realize that you need to pay for additional brainpower (resources).

Build Better Relationships

One of the most shocking aspects of creating a self-development plan is how much it can help relationships. When you realize that you only control your own behavior and actions, it starts to get easier to manage relationships. Treating them how you want to be treated is an excellent start but becoming self-aware enough to go farther and realize that not everyone likes what you like so you may need to treat someone the way they like to be treated instead.

Whatever you want to work on can be done via the personal development plan. Whether you want to lose weight, start a business, change jobs, or go back to school – the goal doesn’t matter as much as developing the plan that you need to get where you want to go. Your plan will not be the same as anyone else’s because you are different. That’s why it’s so consequential and unique because it’s just for you.

It’s Not True That………

Whether we are aware of it or not each of us has a set of core values and beliefs about life. These core values and beliefs influence the vision we have of the future and even sometimes the past.

These core values and beliefs are often developed in childhood and for many of us these ideas come from our parents, but they also come from general society. The TV shows you watched growing up, the friends you had, their parents, your teachers and whatever was happening in the world as you grew up that is reflected on the news affects your values and beliefs as well.

Many of these things we don’t even realise are there. Therefore, we will sometimes react unconsciously to things that strike at those core values and beliefs. Sometimes those actions lead us down the wrong path. Working on our personal development can enable us to become much more self-aware about our core values and beliefs and why we have specific ideas or not.

Positive & Negative Core Beliefs

Everyone has both positive and negative core beliefs. The more positive thoughts you have, the more positive you will behave, as you embark on achievement. These positive beliefs include things like believing you are worthy, safe, competent and capable, appreciated, accepted, knowledgeable, and so forth.

Negative beliefs are often focused and based on your personality or inner-self, as well as on a negative thought that someone had about you or based on something you said about yourself. These can be very limiting to your self-esteem. That’s why you can meet two people, who have the same job, make the same amount of money, and one will be happy and satisfied, while the other person will inwardly feel miserable.

Finding Out Core Values & Beliefs are Negative

You may not even realise you have beliefs that are causing you to be held back. If you’ve watched person after person succeed at something that you want to do, are you able to identify how to improve it or are you not able to accept that a core idea or belief you have is holding you back?

Are You Willing to Change?

If you want to embark on a journey of personal development, you need to be willing to challenge your core beliefs, ideas, and even the vision you have created for your life. Until you know what’s true, accurate, and based on facts rather simply on opinions or false beliefs, it’ll be hard to envision how far you can go towards the advancements you want to make. It may be the difference between deciding to become a Doctor or a Nurse. Neither career is a wrong choice. However, one might be better for you, when considering your likes, dislikes, existing skills, your health, and your interests, goals, and other preferences.

As you work through your development plan in all aspects of your life, you’ll come to many surprising realisations. Some of them will be a surprise, others, not so much. The critical point is to realise that the ideas you have right now, even your most core beliefs and values may change once you find out it’s not true. For instance, it’s not true that you can’t lose weight. It’s not true that you cannot start your own business. It’s not true that you aren’t good enough. If you find that you have limiting core beliefs and values, you will want to work on those first. Without the inside taken care of, it’s hard to fix everything else.

The Importance of Good Self-Care

In my previous post I touched on the importance of good self-care and I want to explore that a little more. The evidence from my research shows that people who have high self-confidence tend to take really good care of themselves.

They are good at self-care and make it a priority in their lives. This can feel strange to some people who weren’t taught that growing up, and it can seem self-centered. But the truth is, it’s not. You have to take care of yourself because honestly, you’re the only one who really can.

Your Happiness Depends on It – You are the only person who truly knows who you are, what you want, and why. Essentially, every single one of us is alone with our own thoughts, morals, and actions. They affect us the most when we put ourselves last. If you want to be happy, you must not just be good to others but be good to yourself too.

Your Health Depends on It – When you are focused on self-care, you’re also focused on being healthy, eating right, exercising, and staying hydrated. Being healthy means that you take care of yourself and put your health needs before the wants of others, or even your own destructive wants. It’s the highest form of self-love.

You Can’t Help Others Unless You Help You First – By now you’ve heard the story that the flight attendant shares if you’ve been on a plane or watched a movie. If the oxygen mask comes down, you must put yours on first before you can take care of someone else’s mask. The reason is that without oxygen you will pass out and you can’t help anyone if you’re not there. If you’re not putting yourself as a priority for the things you need in life, you won’t be good for anyone else.

You Become More Likable – It may seem counter-intuitive but when you practice self-care, people tend to like you more. That’s because you will have a different attitude. You’ll seem well rested, well fed, and relaxed. Plus, when you are happy, it spreads like wildfire and makes others happy too. People like people due to how they feel when they’re around them.

You’re Worth It – The main thing to remember is that you are worth the self-care that you give yourself. You should take care of yourself as well as you would any child, an aging parent, or friend. You’re your best friend and your best advocate, and sometimes the only one who can make the choices.

When you want to be more self-confident, taking care of your needs is the first step. When you are happy, healthy, and less stressed out because you give yourself the time and effort you need, you will simply be happier. When you are happier, you will appear more self-confident and more people will gravitate toward you because of that.

Handling Failure and Rejection Effectively

There are times in all our lives when we might perceive ourselves to have failed at something or for example when we are jobhunting we might experience rejection. Failure or rejection can be challenging to deal with because it can dent our self-confidence and make us think less of ourselves.

Therefore it is clear that in order to become more resilient and better able to handle things we need to to build self-confidence and learn how to deal with failure. No one is successful 100 percent of the time. Everyone can’t always win. Once you get past your early school life we learn fast that awards aren’t for everyone, every time – at least outwardly.

Let’s look at some solid ways to deal with failure and handle rejection that can help to build your self-confidence.

It’s Usually Not Personal – It’s hard to realise, but most of the time when we fail or get rejected at something it’s not personal. Even if it’s the failure of a relationship, there are many factors that aren’t personal that come into play. Try to look at the situation from a distance to remove the personal factors from it.

Learn from the Situation – When you fail at something, allow yourself a little bit of time to go over the failure so that you can learn from it. Write down what you personally could do differently if the situation were to arise again. Be honest with yourself about this so that you can learn.

Don’t Obsess over Failure – While you do want to learn from the situation, you don’t want to take forever obsessing about it and going over it repeatedly. Instead, give yourself a time limit to think about it, get it down in writing, and move on from it.

You Don’t Need Others’ Approval to Be Successful – One reason that failure is often problematic to us as humans is that we don’t want to look bad in front of other people. But the truth is, no one must approve of you for you to be successful. Every single person fails, including even the most judgmental of people.

Change Your Perspective – Sometimes it can help to look at failure from someone else’s perspective. If it was a contest, think about the winner and how they feel. If you can focus on that positive aspect of your loss, it can be a lot more worth it.

The truth is, everyone is going to experience failure or rejection at times if they’re truly trying to succeed in life, whether it’s work or personal in nature. If you aren’t challenging yourself in any way, life will be kind of boring.

If you can view failure as an opportunity to learn and proof that you push yourself, you can turn failure into success because of what you learn from it. For this reason, paying attention to how you care for yourself is important too and I will look at self-care in another article.

Nine Simple Meditation Techniques

I want to share some simple meditation techniques with you that I hope will prove helpful. Studies show that individuals who participate in regular meditation tend to have a more positive outlook and focus less on the negative situations that everyone has in their lives. It makes it easier for them to emotionally navigate issues affecting them. This is because meditation activates the more positive parts of your brain.

Learning to meditate is like anything else you want to do. You need to learn how to do it, then practice doing it, and do it regularly so that it becomes a normal part of your life. That’s really the process of developing any type of habit that is good for you. Keep practicing and keep doing it.

Nine Simple Meditation Techniques

Let’s look at some simple meditation techniques to make meditation work for you.

1. Prepare for Meditation – The best way to help yourself get used to meditating is to set up a process that prepares your mind and body for meditation. It might be having a cup of tea, drinking some lemon water, or doing something else that makes your mind think that it’s time to meditate.

2. Try to Sit Still – When you start meditating, it’s important to find a comfortable position to sit in so that you can sit still. Don’t try to make the poses that everyone else makes if you’re not used to it. The most comfortable sitting up position for you is best.

3. Pray or Use a Mantra – Sometimes, saying something repetitive can calm your mind and help bring your mind into the present. When you are meditating, you don’t want to think of the past or the future; you only want to think of right now. Reciting a prayer that you know, or a mantra, or even a poem can be helpful in bringing you to the present. If you have an Alexa device or something similar then you can also use some of the “Skills” that are available to support you in your meditation

4. Close Your Eyes – Getting rid of visual stimulation is something that will help you become more mindful. Try closing your eyes but don’t look down. Instead, keep your head up and your eyes upward even as they’re closed. This will help keep energy while you are meditating. Ideally, you don’t want to fall asleep while meditating.

5. Choose a Safe Place – When you meditate, you want to be in a safe place that helps you not worry about your surroundings. You don’t want flies attacking you or sounds to be interfering with your concentration. You want the temperature to be comfortable, and to ensure that you remain undisturbed during the process.

6. Get Comfortable – It’s important that you feel comfortable. If you have health issues, you can sit in a chair or on a pillow. You can even sit on a yoga ball while you meditate. The important thing is that you feel comfortable and aren’t experiencing a lot of discomfort and pain.

7. Make the Time – It’s important to set a regular time for meditation. That way your mind and body become accustomed to the fact that you’re going to meditate at that time. When you do something at the same time each day, in the same way, it forms a habit that you’ll need to include in your life.

8. Watch Your Posture – Keeping the right posture during meditation is a good way to ensure you can breathe well, not cause yourself pain, and maintain your energy. You can take on any number of poses, but the one that is best for you is the one that is most comfortable and doesn’t make any part of your body hurt or go numb from cutting off circulation.

9. Learn Proper Breathing Technique – One of the most important aspects of meditating in a way that helps is to learn to breathe properly. The most helpful method is to breathe normally the way you always breathe. But, some people tend to have shallow breaths. Ensure that you breathe in to raise your diaphragm so that you’re getting plenty of oxygen.

Once you set your life up for regular meditation, you’ll find that you get into the zone faster and more easily as time goes by. You will eventually even be able to take five minutes to yourself while waiting in line at the post office, and you will feel refreshed instead of frustrated throughout your day as you become accustomed to using meditation to help you. I really do hope that these Simple Meditation Techniques will help you.