6-Step Personal Development Process to Be Great

Photo by Max van den Oetelaar on Unsplash

Personal development is a lifelong journey to discover who you can become. Everyone has the potential to do great things and become great people. But how do you unlock that potential? How do you go from the person you are now to the person you want to become? You need a personal development process to guide you.

You can apply this process to improve nearly any aspect of your life.

But first, let's start by defining personal development…

What is personal development?

Personal development is the process of building skills and qualities to become the best version of yourself (1). You build these skills in alignment with the goals and values you have. This personal development can be aimed at any area of your life you wish to improve upon, or as a holistic view of your life.

The skills and qualities you build during your personal development will most often apply to other areas of your life. These are called transferable skills.

Here are some examples of skills you can build for your personal development:

Work ethic
Self-discipline
Leadership
Communication
Organization
Problem-Solving

The qualities you build through personal development define your character. You are what you do. These qualities will become self-evident by the skills you build.

Here are some of those qualities:

Integrity
Honesty
Courage
Curiosity
Resilience
Patience
Confidence
Passion

Why spend time on a personal development process?

You might be thinking to yourself “I am fine just the way I am,” or “I don’t need to be better,” or even “personal development is for unhappy people.”

Sure. You can get along in life just fine without investing time and effort into personal development.

But let’s face it, do you really feel great after a 3+ hour TV binge? Or do you feel great after accomplishing a goal you had for years? Which feels more meaningful to you?

If you think that accomplishing a goal you had would feel meaningful, then you realize the importance of priorities.

I wrote a blog post about why we need to have priorities in our lives, check it out here if you are interested. In this post, I took a deep dive into how setting priorities makes your life feel meaningful. Having meaningful things to do in your life helps you avoid the regret you feel after wasting your time, such as a long TV binge.

Priorities give you purpose.

You could become someone great. You could finally defeat the obstacles that hold you back. Or you could develop skills that propel your career forward, building your reputation and making you more money. You could provide more for your family.

The list of things that personal development can do for you is limitless.

The rewards for building yourself are greater than you could possibly imagine.

Here is a 6-step personal development process to build a fulfilling life:

Identify where you want to improve. The first step to improving yourself is awareness. You must know what it is you’re unsatisfied within your life. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have a compelling reason to change. Once you are aware of what you want to improve, then you can move to the next steps.
Determine what skills you need. After you know what you want to improve, then you need to decide how you are going to tackle this challenge. Think about the following: What skills do you need to make this change? Do you have these skills already? Or do you need to build them? Can you build these skills while working on the area you want to improve?
Create a plan. At this point, you know what you want to improve, and the skills you need to accomplish this improvement. So now it is time to create a plan. Having an organized approach makes it easy to act on your desire to improve. All you have to do is follow your plan.

To create your plan, think about where you want to be in a month, six months, one year, five years, and so on. Then, map out the actions you need to take to get there. Write down the big actions you’ll need to take. These will guide the smaller actions you’ll need to take.

Start mapping out the smaller actions you plan to take. These are the actions you’ll take on a daily and weekly basis. The things that will become part of your routine.

Be specific. Write down the what, when, where, how, and why of the actions you are planning to take. This will give you a clear picture of what exactly you are going to do to get where you want to be.

You will not know all of the small actions you need to take. That’s ok. You can always research them later down the road. For now, focus on things that you know can help get you closer to where you want to be.

4. Take action. This is the most important step. None of the other steps matter if you don’t take action. Action is what propels you forward to your best self. Actions are what create change for you.

By now you’ve already planned out the actions you need to take. So get to it!

5. Apply to other areas of your life. The skills you build during your personal development transfer to other areas of your life. Think about what areas you could apply these new skills to. Come up with a plan to apply these new skills to those other areas. And then, take action.

6. Repeat. You likely have several areas of your life that you want to improve. After you go through steps 1 through 5, start working on another skill you want to develop. Repeat this process to develop that skill.

You could continue this process for the rest of your life.

Imagine how much you could accomplish in your life by following this process. Imagine the person you could become. And imagine how great that would make you feel.

Build qualities while building skills

Building qualities comes from building skills. Want to be disciplined? Lift weights. Want to be courageous? Try something new. Take chances. Want to build curiosity? Become a lifelong learner. Read. Write. Listen to podcasts. You get the idea…

The key to becoming your best self is to keep the promises you make to yourself. If you say you’re going to do something, do it! If you want to become better at something, then work on it!

This builds your integrity and self-confidence. You’ll begin to trust yourself more. And this will carry over into other areas of your life.

After all, if you can’t keep the promises you make for yourself, why would anyone make promises with you? Why would anyone believe you if you’ve been saying for months or years that you want to do something, but you never act on it? Think about it.

Wrapping up

Personal development is a lifelong journey. Greatness isn't built in a day. Take your time. Pace yourself. There will be obstacles in your way. There will be times you don’t feel motivated to continue. There will be times you feel like giving up.

Keep your vision of your ideal self in mind. Having a role model or person you aspire to be like can help guide your personal development journey. You could even develop qualities and skills you admire from multiple people.

This is how you create your own path.

I wrote about the importance of having a role model in another blog post. In this post, I discussed how the ancient Stoics called their role models the Stoic sage. Check out this blog post here to learn more.

Your personal development journey will be one of the best decisions you made for yourself.

Enjoy the journey.

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