How to Change My Life – Make A Personal Development Plan

"Fail to plan and plan to fail" - old military saying

What is a personal development plan?

Well, it’s just like any other plan; it acts as a guide to the steps you need to achieve in order to reach your goal.

You can call it what you like: financial plan; health plan; travel plan; spiritual plan – but for simplicity, because I am not sure what your particular goal is, we’ll just call it your personal development plan – that should cover it all.

So far you’ve decided to change your life and you’ve discovered your goals. Now you need a plan. So how do you go about preparing one?

Now, before we get down to it, make sure that your goal is something specific and quantifiable. We dealt with these in the previous article ( How to change your life – Part One ) so you should have something like: “I want to own my own home in 3 years time”.

Your goal, of course, will be even more specific for best results and to make personal development planning easier, so you should have specified what kind of house, number of rooms, garden/drive/garage, location, price range, and so forth – the more specific and detailed the better (remember visualisation?). But for the purposes of this example, we will just assume a property worth around £120,000.

Of course, to own your own home, you do not need the full £120,000 (unless your goal is to have the house mortgage free, of course), but in order to get the house, you will need a deposit, buying fees, moving costs, and to be able to afford the monthly commitment of the mortgage and insurances, and hopefully something towards repairs on other on-going expenses such as decorating and maintenance.

At this point, for this example, you will need to do some research and work out how much you need. You’ll need a deposit, say 10%; let’s assume another 3% for fees and moving costs. That means you’ll need around £15,000 in savings up front.

You have set yourself a goal of achieving this within 3 years. So now you have some simple calculations to work out your step-by-step plan.

£15,000 divided by 3 years = £5,000 per year.

£5,000 divided by 12 months = approx £417 per month (or, divided by 52 weeks = approx £96 per week).

This assumes that you currently start without any savings, but if you do have some money tucked away already, then you can deduct that from the £15,000 and divide up the balance.

Also, depending on whether you enjoy playing with numbers or not, you may develop a sliding scale, especially if you expect your income to increase over the 3 year period. Or you can factor in interest on savings over the period concerned, but, for this example, we’ll keep it simple and assume no savings.

So now you have a basic personal development plan outlined: Save £96 per week (or £417 per month) towards your goal. Simple!

Of course, you’ll also need to make sure that you are earning enough to put aside the amount planned, and to cover the ongoing monthly costs of the property once you have it. If this is within your current budget, then you’re ok and you have you’re plan. If not, then you’ll have to incorporate within your plan the means to increase your income accordingly.

This planning process would be the same for any goal. Say you wanted a career change: “I want to be a lawyer 5 years from now”; “I want to lose 2 stone in 9 months”; etc., then you simply work on the same principle.

1.Determine the overall goal and, if appropriate, the length of time you would realistically expect to achieve it.

2.Break the overall goal down into bit sized pieces to give a series of smaller stepping-stone goals towards the overall goal.

That’s it. Simple.

Most goals will involve breaking things down using mathematical breakdown, however, this may not always be the case, but the process is the same.

For example, your goal may be to stop smoking. In this case, you will probably set a date in the near future, say: next Monday, for example. Then you will need to make a plan to clear your home and/or workspace of all smoking paraphernalia by that date; you will have to plan what activities you will use to help distract you from smoking when the pangs appear; and you may also want to change your routine to avoid those ‘habitual’ cigarettes. You may also decide to take up an exercise routine or some other hobby that will help you, not only with dealing with the habit and withdrawal pangs through distraction, but also to help you refocus your energies and find some success reward to help you stay on track. All of this may involve some smaller goals to put into place before the ‘big day’, such as applying for gym membership; making an appointment with your local clinic to join a support group of to get a stock of nicotine patches or some other aid; clearing or changing your social diary so as not to put yourself into situations that will provide too much temptation during the early stages of giving up, etc.

So you see, it’s quite a simple process to plan for whatever it is that you want to achieve. In fact, for many people, the planning is much easier than actually knowing what it is that they want to achieve in the first place.

So, now it’s over to you. Make your personal development plan!