This personal development plan will change your life

Even if you've tried to make changes before but keep getting overwhelmed or discouraged

Photo by Shot by Cerqueira on Unsplash

If you’ve tried to make changes in your life but keep getting overwhelmed or discouraged, which blocks you from creating momentum, you need a personal development plan.

Today, I’m showing you exactly how to use a personal development plan to make your dreams real without overwhelm or uncertainty.

The best way to approach personal development is to pick a goal that matters to you and then let that goal show you where you need to grow.

Otherwise, you’re not building or working toward anything meaningful. It’s that journey toward a purposeful goal that makes life fulfilling.

And without applying the knowledge you learn in all the books you read or podcasts you listen to, you’re not really learning, but just consuming information.

If you’re ready to truly create the life you want, then let’s go.

Before we get started my name is Suzanne, and I’m a spiritual life coach who helps ambitious women find their purpose and live free.

Here’s today’s agenda:

We’re going to start with the bigger picture of what you want to create in life, and then zoom in to the specific, doable actions you can take today to achieve your goals.

Too many people pick a random goal out of thin air, but if it’s not rooted in your deeper values or core soul desires, you’ll struggle with consistency.

You need to connect to why something matters in order to persevere through the ups and downs, and also ensure you’re spending time on a goal aligned with your soul.

Watch the whole Reinvent Yourself series to get the best results.

Part 1:

Part 2 (video coming soon):

Discover your core values in 3 simple steps

Step 1: Connect to your big vision

Connect to the areas of life you feel called:

• Spirituality

• Health

• Home

• Relationships

• Business or career

• Money (this may relate to business)

• Community

• Fun

And write out a few sentences of what you want to create. If you want to go deep into each area and create vision boards for them, you will love my Play with the Day yearly goal journal.

Step 2: Identify your Big 3

As I always say, you can create any kind of life you want to, but not all at once.

So pick your Big 3 focus areas.

My Big 3 are health, money and friendship.

My marriage is solid as a rock, thank God for the best, most supportive husband.

My health is much better, but it’s always important to focus on health because it’s the foundation of everything else in life (along with God, personally).

And my home captured allllll of my focus from 2020 to 2023 while we were buying and renovating a 1977 fixer upper, much of that during the pandemic craziness!

So this year, I’m ready to shift my focus to business and community.

What are your Big 3? Share in the comments.

Step 3: Determine what success looks like for each Big 3.

I’m not a fan of SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound) because they sound too corporate-y.

I imagine someone in a grey suit and pasty complexion with some PowerPoint, and as a quirky creative, anything resembling that special shade of cubicle grey makes me run the other way!

I also dislike SMART goals because I prefer to create habit-based goals, and organize them in systems, rather than focus on outcomes that I can’t always control.

And yet, defining success paints a clear picture of what you’re aiming toward so you know if your efforts are working.

In just one or two words or numbers for each Big 3, what does success look like?

Maybe you want to find a fulfilling career or lose 10 pounds.

Step 4: Brainstorm ways you could create that success.

Make this action plan something simple you can and actually will do.

For example, to achieve my goal of becoming less of a homebody and making one really good, soulmate friend, I decided that I will find a workout class to attend regularly at the gym. I also want to become involved in my community in some way, whether through politics or volunteering.

You want to turn your action steps into daily or weekly habits — things you can track.

Step 5: Identify skills you need to build

This is how your goals fuel your personal growth and guide you toward realizing your potential.

Skills you want to learn can include anything from content creation or design for business to soft skills like how to build deeper relationships or set stronger boundaries.

A lot of times people have a fixed mindset, which says: “This is who I am, I have to work with what I’ve got.”

But becoming the woman you’re meant to be requires a growth mindset, which says: “I can learn any skill and grow in any area needed to create the life I want.”

Time spent building these skills also needs to become a habit, whether daily or weekly.

Step 6: Create a phased action plan for your bigger goals

Some goals are simple — go to the gym 4 times a week.

Other goals involve more complexity. This easily creates overwhelm and causes uncertainty for even the most hard-working and high-achieving women because it’s hard to know where to focus.

If you’re not sure where to focus, you end up skipping around, starting a new project or trying a new strategy rather than leaning into the difficulty of developing new skills to actually achieve your goals.

If you want to create your dream life, you need to ground your energy and work through obstacles that arise rather than reacting to them and jumping to the next shiny object.

Part of this is building stronger self-belief, which we’ll talk about, but the practical side of this is building a phased action plan.

A phased action plan helps you see how the puzzle pieces of your vision fit together so you don’t jump from goal to goal, never sure what to work on or making progress.

Here’s what my phased action plan for my business looks like:

You can see that at first, I was focusing on Substack and health because my energy was still a little inconsistent.

I’m now in Phase 2 — Creating YouTube videos and so lucky to be working with one amazing client. I have space for one more!

My health habits are ingrained and paying off in better energy, so it’s not something I have to think about anymore. That’s how focus allows you to build and expand over time.

Two things to keep in mind when you’re outlining phases:

1. Pick the habit or project with the highest leverage first.
   You can see that I focused on health first, really because I had no choice, but some people feel like they can ignore their health. And you can, until you can’t.
   
   So if you’re not sleeping well, you’re under a lot of stress, or you don’t have a good workout routine, I highly recommend focusing on sleep, exercise, food or nervous system regulation in Phase 1.
   

2. Have a clear end point.
   It’s not written here, but what does success at each phase look like for you?
   
   It’s easy to get stuck in one phase, thinking it’s not dialed in enough and waiting for the right time to move on.
   
   But another one of my core life philosophies is that you have to move to the next level before you’re ready. You don’t want to move prematurely, so it is a balance, but moving on is what gets you ready.
   
   For example, if I waited until my Substack growth was perfectly dialed in, I wouldn’t be starting YouTube right now. But I’m in a good rhythm with my work here, and it feels doable to add on.
   

Step 7: Create a Phase 1 action plan

Now that you’ve identified a Phase 1 goal, create an action plan for that specific phase, and break it into daily or weekly habits.

Include time for learning skills, along with daily or weekly actions.

Make sure to focus on the most powerful needle-movers that will create momentum.

For example, if your goal is to turn your passion into a business, don’t tweak a website for months when in reality, you might not even need a website right away.

Instead, ask: what are the biggest needle movers?

For health, maybe that’s sleep or food or exercise.

For business, maybe that’s creating an offer and figuring out how to sell it.

For a new career, maybe that’s researching companies you’d like to work with and setting the goal to send out 5 resumes a week.

If you want a habit tracker, check out Play the the Day yearly goal journal.

Step 8. Create the mindset, identity and self-belief

Now we get to the heart of personal development, and how our goals push us to become the best possible versions of ourselves.

Your old doubts, fears and insecurities may already be coming up. 

You might be thinking:

• I’m too old. 

• I’m too young.

• I’m not good enough.

• People might judge me.

• I’m not unique or special enough.

Most of these things aren’t true. Some might be — people may judge you. But you have to choose: are you going to let outside opinions control you?

At the end of your life, you’re going to wish you went for it. You’re going to think back to this very moment and wish with all of your heart that you dug deeper, went bolder and moved bigger to just go for it.

So do it now instead of dying with regret.

You have a purpose, a destiny and a calling to fulfill.

Your mission in life is to build up your self-love, self-belief, resourcefulness and creativity to realize the dream inside your heart.

That’s the adventure of your lifetime, and it will always haunt you unless you embrace it and choose to live your purpose.

If you’re ready to find your purpose and live free, book a call to talk about working together 1:1.

Step 9. Track your habits

As Nietzsche said:

“Look at your habits: Are they the product of innumerable little cowardices and laziness…or of your courage and inventive reason?”

The quality of our lives, and whether we do or don’t live our dreams, quite simply comes down to our daily habits.

You don’t “write a book,” you sit down every day and write.

You don’t “become an artist,” you sit down every day and paint.

You don’t “build a successful business,” you sit down every day and work on needle-moving activities that generate revenue.

I recommend committing to a specific action plan for 30 to 90 days and then re-evaluating.

This gives you plenty of time to sit with your efforts, tweaking them to get better results, before you make a bigger decision about whether this is the right strategy for you.

And if you really want to achieve your goals, you need to overcome the limiting beliefs that cause self-doubt, halt your momentum and prevent you from creating the fulfilling and creatively self-expressed life you deserve.

Next week I’ll share my super powerful process for shifting your mindset and overcoming limiting beliefs!

Thanks for reading :)

If you liked this article, consider liking, commenting or sharing it to help it reach more people.

I love hearing from you in the comments, so let me know your biggest takeaways!

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Guided inner work

This week, your guided inner work will explore bonus material on how to achieve your goals and become successful.

You’ll explore:

• Deciding versus wanting and creating a mindset for success

• Psychology of winning

• Overcoming upper limits

• Aligning to the seasons of life

• Reclaiming your power when you feel afraid

All the love,

Suzanne