This is how to write your personal development plan (examples and templates)

Key tenets of your personal development plan

There are different ways to go about making a personal development plan. But if you look at the core of all those methods, they all have key things in common. They’re based on you having a crystal clear picture of where you are, where you want to go, and what’s holding you back from getting there. Aka, they’re based on well-defined goals. Which is why we discussed that before even speaking about planning. Remember: be aware of your obstacles.

Personal development plan contents

Once you know exactly what you want, you’ll need to create a simple routine to get you there. Reduce that goal into a process. Start with the simplest actions possible and scale from there. Want to run a marathon? Create a routine to run 2.5 km three times a week. Then slowly raise the number of kilometers you run.

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After you have your simple routine that you can follow, again and again, look at the obstacles that are holding you back from doing what you set out to do. Then create a plan around your routine to address that obstacle. Using our marathon example again, maybe an obstacle is you’re always very drowsy in the morning—and that stops you from going out to run because you can’t get out of bed. Something you could do is have your running gear right beside your bed. So when you wake up drowsy, all you have to think about is putting on your shoes. Once you do that, everything else follows.

Then, once you’ve done this for one of the holistic themes. Do it again for the others. Go down the list and create goals and routines and plans for obstacles you face with each of them.

How to not write a personal development plan

The next part—and this is the most important part that most people miss—is to make sure your plans are open to change and optimisation. We’ve all heard the saying “no plan ever survives first contact with the enemy.” It’s more true for personal development than most people realise. The first plan you make is almost never the perfect plan for you. So you need to keep analysing your failures—because you will fail—and keep creating mini-plans to address why it happened.

And finally, be honest with your growth. Are you trying to move too fast? Are you taking on more than you can handle? Or is it the opposite: Are you really progressing as fast as you should? And are you doing too little to matter? All things you’ll need to consider and incorporate into your plan as you move forward.

But the major thing to take out of all this, which you might have noticed, is that a good personal development plan is never one-and-done. It’s fluid and constantly changing.