Develop a Personal Development Plan
To develop a personal development plan, you need to start with the end in mind. It's OK if you don't know how you will get there - you just need to be clear on what"there" is for you. Here are some helpful questions to help you develop a personal development plan: 1. Where are you right now? Be honest. What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? What makes you happy? What infuriates you? How are you doing at work? Are you satisfied with your current physical, financial, emotional and spiritual state? Why or why not? 2. Where do you want to be in one month? Six months? One year? Five years? Think in manageable chunks of time. Start small and focus on the short term before building up to larger, long-term goals that may take a few years to achieve. 3. How can you get there? This is the hard part. It's easy for people - myself included - to get overwhelmed and you can get stuck in analysis paralysis. The best way to tackle this step is to just dive in. Simply write 2-3 action steps for each of your big, broad goals. It gets you kick started and gets your creative juices flowing. Sometimes, it can be easier to start at the end and work backwards. For example, if 5 years from now you want to be an attorney, then write down that you must first pass the Bar, and before you can pass the Bar, you have to graduate law school and before you graduate law school, you have to pass all of your courses, and before you can pass all of your courses, you needto be accepted to law school...and so on and so on. Or, if you want to buy a house, which is a big and overwhelming goal for many people, then first you need to save up for a down payment and have good credit. Before you can have the down payment, you need to open a bank account to hold the savings and before you can open the bank account, you need enough money to qualify to open the bank account in the first place. What could you do this month to generate enough extra money to open up the bank account? Sometimes, starting backwards is the easiest way to develop a personal development plan.
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Exhausted? Stressed-out? Overwhelmed?
Hi,Courtney here, author of this site. When I developed anxiety and depression, I went to a psychologist, a psychiatrist and a physician, and to be truthful, in my experience, these people couldn't really help.Therapy sessions, yoga and getting more exercise lessened my anxiety symptoms, but did not stop them for good.
In fact, I later learned that because I was living in a constant state of low-level stress and anxiety, the chemicals in my brain had changed, making me more anxious and depressed. Clearly, merely managing my symptoms was not enough - in fact, following "the doctor's orders" made things worse....
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