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Create A Personal Growth Plan:
Set, Track, and Achieve Your Personal Goals
While you may stumble onto personal growth opportunities, deliberately creating a personal growth plan can rapidly accelerate your progress.
Think about it like a journey. If you set out with no map, no plan, and no resources, you may wind up somewhere wonderful. You may also wind up at the city dump.
On the other hand, if you craft a plan, have a good map, and prepare well, you have a much better likelihood of having a pleasant and productive trip.
This page will provide step by step instructions for making a personal growth plan that helps you set clear goals, identify measures of success, track your progress over time, and achieve them with style.
Here's an overview of this process. To create a personal growth plan, we're going through four main steps:
- Assessment: Determine where you are and where you want to go
- Goal Setting: Set clear goals and measures of success
- Learn & Develop: Determine learning experiences
- Evaluate: Set dates to measure your progress and determine next steps
Be sure to check out the other articles in this section to help you along the way: the power of setting personal goals, tips on setting goals, goal setting worksheets, step-by-step goal setting instructions, examples of SMART goals, and a sample full personal development plan.
Ready? Let's build a personal growth plan.
Step 1: Assess
To assess where you are and where you want to go, ask yourself the following questions:
- Based on these values and priorities, what do I want to improve, develop, grow, or make happen?
- What would drastic success in six months look like?
- What strengths do I have to build on?
- What weaknesses do I have I need to improve or mitigate?
- What obstacles must I overcome?
- What resources do I have to help me grow?
You also may want to discuss these questions with people close to you. They can give you good feedback and insights into things that you may not see in yourself.
Also, there are also over 2,000 assessments instruments on the market available to help you assess yourself. One of my favorites is the Strengthsfinder 2.0 assessment, by Tom Rath. The book, which you can find it at any bookstore, provides access to an online test which reveals your natural strengths and strategies for harnessing them.
Step 2: Goal Setting
Once you have clarity on the general direction you'd like to go in, it's time to set clear goals. Clear goals meet the following criteria, as described in the acronym SMART:
• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Timebound
For example, if you wanted improve your public speaking skills, you could set a SMART goal such as: "Give 5 presentations to audiences of at least 10 people in the next 6 months".
Notice how this goal is much more clear and concrete than "Become a better public speaker." That makes it much easier to design concrete actions steps and measure success later.
That said, some goals lend themselves more easily to being SMART. Visit my page on examples of SMART goals for more.
For more information, visit my tips on setting goals page and my page with step-by-step instructions for goal setting.
And, be sure to check out the goal setting worksheets page to get free templates.
Step 3: Plan to Learn & Develop
Once you have a clear set of goals, the next step is to clarify what you will do to learn and develop.
Although we usually think of training or formal education for learning skills, research actually reveals that of the skills people possess:
• 70% come from experience
• 20% come from exposure
• 10% come from education
That means that the majority of your learning will come from in-the-saddle experience you have.
For example, take public speaking. While you may read a book about public speaking or talk with a mentor about it, you become a great public speaker by doing it over, and over, and over. (In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell claims it takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve complete mastery. . .think Yo Yo Ma. . .)
Now, exposure and education can be very helpful for getting a necessary background understanding of a topic.
But, if you want to grow, avoid getting stuck in theory; move to action and practice, practice, practice.
Step 4: Evaluate
When creating your personal growth plan, clarify when you will stop and measure your progress. I recommend doing this around the mid-point and of course at the end.
When you pause at the mid-point to evaluate your progress, you can fine tune your approach and increase the odds that you will hit your ultimate objectives. Be sure you ask yourself questions such as:
• Are you progressing like you thought you would?
• Where have your biggest successes been so far?
• What's holding you back from reaching your goal?
When you evaluate your progress at the end, be sure to identify what allowed you to be successful and what stood in your way. Also, what was the most important thing you learned in the process?
Finally, plan to celebrate your achievements in ways that reinforce your goal. (For example, if your goal is to lose weight, celebrate by participating in a race in a fun destination. Taking yourself out to dinner would not be a good reward . . .)
By following these four steps to create a clear personal growth plan, you can dramatically increase the odds that you will grow in your desired direction. While it's rare for people to stick exactly to their plan, following your personal growth plan can help focus your efforts, resources, and time and can yield dramatic results.
So, good luck. Now that you've got your personal growth plan, I encourage you to explore the rest of the site to find other resources that may be helpful for you.
If you'd like some words of wisdom to help inspire you as you implement your personal growth plan, please visit my personal growth quotes page.
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