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How often do you sit back and reflect on your personal goals? We all lead busy lives, and it’s easy to get caught up in the day to day, letting life happen to you rather than you leading it. When you prioritise your personal development, you take back control of your life and steer it towards where you want it to go.
WHAT IS PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT?
Personal development involves building skills that help improve who you are and what you do. You might focus on emotion, mindset or behaviour. Clarifying your purpose in life, your deepest values and where you want to be can help you develop habits that will better equip you to achieve what you want to get out of life. Goal setting is critical to personal development, as it provides an overall direction to help you decide how to spend your time and where to focus your energies.
GOAL SETTING AND MENTAL HEALTH
Goal setting has positive impacts on mental health, with literature that shows the links between goal setting and subjective wellbeing. Psychotherapies used to treat depression, include goal setting as a way for adults to take control of their wellbeing and have been proven to improve treatment outcomes.
SETTING YOUR PERSONAL GOALS
To create your personal development plan, it helps to start by thinking broadly and longterm. Consider where you’d like to be in terms of mental wellbeing, career, loved ones, physical wellbeing and financially. Some of these areas may be more important to you than others. Once you’ve identified the accomplishments you’d like to make long-term, you can then break them down into smaller, achievable goals and get to work making it all happen.
INTENTION OVER RESOLUTION
To avoid being overly hard and fast with your personal development strategy, choose intention over resolution. Resolutions are often strict, short term and easy to break. Intention on the other hand, is a more compassionate way to achieve your goal, focussing on goal setting as a way of living and thinking every day. The changes you make with intention go deeper into your core, meaning you’re more likely to achieve your own personal success.
TRACKING YOUR PROGRESS
You must make time to review your personal development plan and how you’re tracking. Congratulate yourself when you reach your goals and think about what you’ve learned from each experience that you can use moving forward. You might decide to change your goals or timeframes. Your plan and the process are fluid, you can reign things in or reach even higher than you imagined when you first started.
Understanding how to develop goal setting plans is a critical part of human behaviour study. At ACAP, we prepare you with the skills to set effective goals for yourself that will last a lifetime.
