Everything you want to do, whether it’s driving across the country, starting a family, or building a business, is easier to accomplish if you have a good plan that you can put into practice. It’s easier to do everything when you have a solid plan in place. 

That plan should be based on facts, self-knowledge, and due diligence when it comes to learning what it takes to achieve your goals. Often, when this includes setting goals that maximize your success, you’re much more likely to be successful. 

When you create your personal development plan (PDP), remember to set goals for growth in all five areas, which include mental, social, spiritual, emotional, and physical aspects. You may have many plans for your life, such as owning a home, going to college, raising kids, or starting a business.

Every one of your life goals fits into one or more of the areas of personal development in terms of improving yourself in that area enough that you can have what you say you want to have in your life. 

1. Mental – Learning how and why you think the way you do and learn best and acquiring more skills for success in your career, life, and so forth.
   
2. Social – Build strong interpersonal relationships and valuable networks with your family and community at large.
   
3. Spiritual – Finding your purpose in life and discovering your personal principles, morals, and values and why you think the way you do.
   
4. Emotional – Learn to notice, identify, and manage your feelings in a healthy manner. This may take some practice if you are just starting out.
   
5. Physical – Take care of your physical body per current scientific information to become more fit and healthy. 

Whether you want to become more fit or discover your life purpose, your personal development plan will help you achieve your goals. However, developing your PDP is the first step. The next is to put your PDP into practice. Once you have the plan you need to implement it and take action in your daily life. These tips for putting your personal development plan into practice will ensure that you are on the path to success. 

Obtain The Right Tools 

You would be pretty disturbed if you went to a job at a corporation and were not provided tools to get the job done, such as a desk, computer, programs, and so forth. Yet, many people expect to accomplish all their dreams without ever obtaining and using the right tools. So, don’t end up disappointed. Instead, get and use the right tools. 

• Safety – Depending on the tool, using the right ones can improve your and other people’s safety. For example, using a good, sharp knife when you prep veggies for dinner to avoid cutting yourself, or wearing the right shoes to work out to take good care of your feet and back. 

• Improved Productivity – You’ll make the task more manageable when you have the right tools. For example, automating your bookkeeping using Go Daddy Bookkeeping can save an hour or two a week, depending on how much work you do.

• More Satisfaction – It’s more fun doing tasks with the right tools that really work for the job as intended. Why risk wasting your hard work using substandard tools that take away from your life satisfaction?

• More Success – The plain truth is that using the right tool will ensure you are more successful. For example, if your new business needs a mailing list, your personal email will ensure failure, while paying for a professional and legal choice will ensure your success. 

• Less Fatigue – Using the wrong tool can not just harm your body and mind, but it can literally cause you to experience stress-related exhaustion and fatigue. While using the right tool makes the job easier and thus less fatiguing in every way.

• Less Waste and Damage – The wrong tools might even cause you to waste time, supplies, and effort. You may even, in some cases, damage your reputation or, worse, your body. 

Purchase or obtain any tools you need to get started, including those that help you overcome obstacles and become familiar with them. Even if you aren’t going to use the tool personally, it’s a good idea to at least understand some of it so that you can find help. 

Plan Your Actions 

Planning your actions is an imperative component of your PDP and the part that enables you to put your plan into practice. Additionally, the benefits of a PDP action plan include highlighting the steps needed to achieve results while also helping you stay motivated and committed to your plan. 

Once you have developed your goals, you’ll need to determine which parts of your goals require action on your part or on someone else’s part. Your action plan needs to include detailed descriptions of your goal, the steps required, who and what is required in order to carry it out, and a way to measure results. For each goal that you’ve set, you’ll need to try the suggestions below to follow through.

• Define the end goal – When it’s all said and done, what do you want the end to look like?

• List the steps required – What actions are needed to make the outcome happen?

• Prioritize the steps required – Fully describe in detail each step and act in the order they need to happen.

• Determine the time needed – How long will it take?

• Set milestones and deadlines – Using the info collected, set your deadlines and checkup or milestone areas.

• Know who, when, where, what, and how – For each action required who and how will it happen. Specifics are a must.

• Identify the tools and resources needed – What tools do you need to use, access, or purchase to make it happen?

• Note potential bottlenecks and roadblocks – What can go wrong and how you’ll deal with it or avoid it.

• State intended impact – What do you what the result to look like?

Based on your PDP, take the time to actively plan the actions you will take this week in the order needed to avoid issues, roadblocks, and bottlenecks before adding them to your schedule directly. It’s more likely to occur when you know what to do and how it’s all going to happen.

Your action plan isn’t concrete. It’s more like a guide that you will use along the way. If the guide produces the desired and planned results, you’ll keep going. However, if the guide is causing the wrong impact, you can change. 

Add Actions to Your Schedule 

An important goal of personal development is to make it easier for you to achieve success in your life. So, as you create your personal development plan, pay close attention to the doing portion of your plan. After all, putting your plan into practice requires you to take actions. Of course, whether managing others to do tasks or doing tasks yourself depends on your situation. Still, the actions you need to take or oversee need to get into your schedule realistically.

To add actions to your schedule you will need to do the following:

• Prioritise -How you do the things needed to achieve your aims depends on factors only you may know. So, arrange, order, and rank the tasks you need to do based on the other things you need to do in your day. Then base those things on what you believe is most important, determined by the impact you’re seeking to achieve. 

• Be Realistic – Don’t torture yourself by putting things on your schedule you know you cannot really do and will not do. For example, don’t schedule something at 5 am if you know that you’re not going to get 8 hours of sleep if you do that. It’s not healthy and not realistic for long-term planning in your life. 

• Stay Organised – This goes with the idea of using the right tools and resources that help you achieve the desired results. Depending on what you’re doing, you may need to buy physical, organizational equipment or invest in software like Basecamp.org to keep yourself, a team or your family organized. 

• Delete, Delegate, and Outsource – As you schedule daily action toward the results you’re seeking, remember that you do not have to do everything. Some things don’t matter and have no effect on the bottom line and are simply busywork. Other things you’re not good at doing and you should outsource to someone who can do it faster and better. And yet, other tasks you just don’t want to do and can get someone to do them does just as well as you. 

• Include Breaks – As you develop your daily schedule, you’ll want to ensure you have time to do all the things you need to do to maintain your entire lifestyle and not just one aspect. Whether it’s mental, spiritual, emotional, social, or physical growth, the only way to really succeed is to allow yourself enough time to do the tasks, steps, and actions needed. 

Your action plan will come down to your daily schedule and what you do to work toward your goals regularly. Some actions will become new routines and habits, and some actions will simply be in your schedule because it’s the day to do it. 

The more tasks you can turn into routines and habits, the easier it will become for you to succeed at your goals. But whatever you do, don’t overschedule, creating roadblocks for yourself before you even get started. Instead, be realistic about the schedule and what you can really do during the time allotted. 

• Track and Evaluate Your Progress -The way to determine if an action is providing the desired results is to track and evaluate the progress you’re making. This requires that you document where you are starting so that you can notice the improvement over time. The gap between where you started versus where you want to be is a critical point of focus. That gap is where progress is made. To track and evaluate your progress use the following suggestions to help you get started.

• Have Clarity Regarding Your Goals – It takes time to become clear about what you really want and, more importantly, understand fully what you need to live up to your full potential. One way to ensure it happens is to learn how to clarify your goals. You can accomplish this by providing for yourself as well as you would a beloved pet in all the essential ways that ensure you’re not just living but thriving. 

• Visualize The End Result Desired – Take the time to truly see the impact of your work should it turn out as planned in your mind. You can accomplish this by creating a vision board or just writing down very descriptive terms regarding what you want the result to look and feel like. 

• Break Down Goals into Small Tasks or Steps – Once you know the goal, you can list a series of actions that will achieve the desired results. For example, if you have set a goal to become more mindful, you will set aside the time to meditate each day with a focus on mindfulness. 

• Record and Organize the Steps – It may include setting up your environment, eating right, getting your other work done, and then arriving in your meditation space on time. Likewise, authoring a novel has steps required that will become narrowed down to doing a task today, such as outlining chapter 6 of your memoir. 

• Set a Realistic Timeline – Creating an action plan that can easily be implemented requires setting a realistic timeline. Setting a realistic timeline requires you to really know yourself and, if not, be willing to test things out and pivot if they don’t work. 

• Keep a Calendar and Journal – Practicing awareness is an essential component of creating realistic and impactful schedules. Don’t trust yourself to remember anything. Instead, get every action you want to take personally, professionally, and otherwise into your calendar. Whether it’s eating lunch with the girls, working on your novel, or doing a job-related task, it needs to be on your calendar.

It can help to use your calendar as a journal too. For example, if you schedule everything in the calendar now, you can also use it to note whether you succeeded in sticking to that schedule or not and how you can improve your future agenda.

• Monitor Daily Progress – This is where the journal can come in within the calendar note how often you’re succeeding at sticking to the schedule you’ve set for yourself versus how often you fail. If you fail more than you succeed, it may be just a process-failure and not something you did wrong. You’re not realistic on the timeline when it proves hard to follow failing to stick to the schedule signals needed adjustments. 

• Review Yourself Weekly, Monthly, and Yearly – Additionally, set up a schedule that allows you to review how you’ve done with your schedule every day, week, month, and year. The reason is that some tasks that wind up in your schedule during any given day may not be a daily habitual task, but you still need to know if your actions are impacting your results. You can only know if a correlation exists if you review and monitor yourself. 

• Reward Yourself – As you notice that you are succeeding at doing the tasks you’ve scheduled for yourself to do, celebrate. Some tasks that you do each day have no apparent results until months or even years later, so adding in a celebration for simply doing your daily tasks even without proof of an impact is essential for your overall motivation and inspiration. 

• Make Changes – Once you check up on yourself to determine the impact of your actions, it’s time to figure out what you need to change. There will almost always be things to change. Your PDP is not going to stay the same throughout your lifetime. But, if you genuinely monitor your actions and how you feel about the actions in a mindful way, you will make changes. 

Track your progress to evaluate the action steps you’re taking each day, week, month, and year to ensure you’re on the right path. By doing so, you’ll ensure that change happens when required to ensure your success and that continuity continues when your actions are effective. 

Everyone has goals they want to accomplish in life, but not everyone knows how to ensure success. Creating and perfecting your personal development plan is one thing you can do to make it much more likely that you will succeed at all your life goals. 

Whether you want to start a business or run a household, it doesn’t matter. However, a personal development plan can and will make experiencing personal success in life a certainty. A well-thought-out personal development plan will help you prioritize, make better choices, and keep you highly motivated for success, but only if you also put the plan into practice.

These tips help you get that plan happening so that you can truly live the life you were meant to live. The only thing in the way of you living your best life is your commitment to crafting and implementing your personal development plan.