PDP - Personal Development Planning

There is very strong evidence to support the belief that every successful person has a concrete personal development plan (often referred to as PDP). Using such a plan has a cumulative effect and guides the person to strengthen their existing skills and to develop new ones.

A great way to structure your PDP is to have a 12 week program that aims to improve on aspect of yourself, your skills or you life each week. Obviously the weekly goals of such a PDP must not be too far-fetched or difficult to attain as 7 days is all you have to reach your objective.

However each of your weekly goals should build on the previous week's accomplishment. This way at the end of 12 weeks you will have moved much further forward in your personal development than you could now imagine.

The very first thing you should do is take a real and honest look at yourself. Self introspection is a skill that you must develop if you ever wish to improve yourself and your life.

Identifying which areas of your life are working and which are not is the first step toward bettering your position in your life, your relationships, your career, finances etc.

The next step should be to identify your strengths and your skills to determine how you can use those strengths and skills to improve areas of your life that are not working.

This is also achieved by reviewing your weakness to see if they are the cause of your current dissatisfactions or if improving them can somehow enrich your life and improve those areas that are not currently working.

Next you should create a life vision that captures your truest and deepest desires. This vision should be the template from which you create your 12 week PDP goals.

Each of your weekly goals should represent an accomplishment in its own right and also bring you one step closer to some overall final objective. As each goal builds on the success of the previous one the final (or 12th week) goal should bring you some bigger overall objective that is connected to your life vision.

Dividing your life vision which is a goal itself, into small 12 week PDPs you will be surprised at just how quickly you start to transform your life!