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The 10,000 foot view
This is how the Project You personal development process goes together.
Reading this will give you a template of the process:
- Do some groundwork to create a focus for your personal development.
- Create a draft development plan by following the seven step process later in the planner.
- Revise the draft plan into a final development plan.
- Implement the plan with assistance from the resources you identified.
- Evaluate your progress and revise your plan as needed.
Phase 1 – What’s Your Focus?
Where are you going?
After completing the Goal Setting Guide you may have started this process with something specific in mind, or as a more general personal development process. Either way, now is the time to consider where you are headed. What is it that you want to achieve?
In large organizations and companies, the personal development process is usually linked to goals because this makes personal development easier.
Goals are “what” you have to do, and it’s “how” you go about achieving them that we’re focusing on here. For example, if one of your personal goals is to raise healthy, happy children on a fixed budget, it will be useful to keep this goal in mind when you look at your personal development needs. You may be doing well on the children front while your bank statement is telling you that you have some ‘improvement opportunities’. ;-)
Buying those educational books helped your kids with their homework, but they could have come from the library instead of the pricey book-store. So, in this case your personal development focus would be on financial management!
New skills or old?
Generally your development areas will fall into two categories; building on existing strengths and developing new skills or competencies. In the previous example, your strength was helping your children and your gap was your financial management ability. You want to continue bringing up your children in the same way, and do something different financially so you meet your monthly budget.
Build on existing skills and develop new skills or competencies
Where are you now?
Before you start any kind of project, you must know where you are starting from. This will become the “baseline” from where you measure your progress. A clear awareness of where you are now will facilitate your development.
What kind of external feedback do you get? Your friends, family, work colleagues and other people you contact regularly are all affected by your behaviour and will have views about your skills. Some external feedback will be more objective and
useful than others, and not all will be glowing! Now is the time to take stock of any feedback you have had and put it to good use.
Note: Good feedback is always specific, clear and non-critical. “You always say stupid things” is not feedback, it is criticism and does not deserve airtime.
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