What would happen if you had a perfect day, each and every day? If you could eliminate all of your bad habits, and ingrain new and better ones? If you could turn yourself from...

 

Lazy, Couch Potato Focused And Driven

 

 

TO

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can, easily! You just need to learn how to develop a personal development plan!

How exactly do you develop a personal development plan? It involves three fundamental steps...

1. Decide On Your Habits

What habits do you want to have in your daily routine? What would it take, if performed daily, would help you reach your goals of losing weight, earning more money, and/or living a life with purpose?

Here are some habits to consider...

Jogging
Learning to meditate
Read 30 minutes a day
Yoga
Eat healthier
Plan each day
Have mid-day snacks
Making time to brainstorm ideas
Developing a new skill or hobby
Learn to play the piano

Think about what habits are most important to you. If your ultimate goal is to lose weight, you definitely want to start with the jogging habit and/or healthier eating. If you want to make more money, you can start with a lot of different things. But developing a new skill should be in your plans.

Once you have the habits you want to develop, it's time to advance to...

2. Making A Schedule

You know what you want to do. Now it's time to plan out how you're going to do it. Your personal development plan will outline the daily routines involved in making yourself the person that you want to become.

Take each habit and think of a part of the day that makes sense for you to do your new habit. It's best to not only have a specific time, but also have a specific trigger moment.

For example, you may generally start work at 9AM. But the actual time you "start work" is really whenever you arrive at your desk. Based on this, your trigger moment would be when you get to your desk. For this reason, when you get around to creating your personal development plan, it's probably best to put your "Time Of Day" as whatever your trigger moment is.

Confused? Have a look at this personal development plan example...

Time Of Day	Action
Upon Arising	Jog for one mile
9:00 Start Of Work (when I first sit down at my computer)	Write for 30 minutes
12:30 After Lunch	Work big task to completion
2:30 Mid-Afternoon Break (when I complete my first afternoon task)	Stretch and eat energy snack (peanuts, blueberries, and/or a vegetable)
5:00 End Of Day	Write in planner next-day tasks
Before Bed (when wife goes to bed)	Do 30 minutes of enjoyable reading, then read my definite chief aim

Understand that your personal development plan doesn't have to look anywhere close to this. The point is to have a "rough sketch" of what it is you are wanting to accomplish in your daily routine.

Once you have an idea of where you want to go, it's time for...

3. Carrying Out Your Plan

Of the three steps in the personal development plan, this one is by far the most important (and the most difficult). I've started many new habits with personal development experiments that I've done. With this experience, I've created a few simple steps to give yourself the best chance of success...

1) Only try to develop one (maximum two) habits at a time. Your chances of failure are astronomically higher whenever you try to do too much at once. When you are first starting your personal development plan, I would highly recommend you start with just one habit, then build from there.

2) Start as easy as possible. Want to jog one mile every day? Start by only jogging a half-mile. Want to write an hour each day? Start with just 10 minutes. Starting small early-on is one of the greatest habit-forming secrets there is.

3) Do your new (easy) habit for 21 straight days. The first 21 days are absolutely critical in building habits in your personal development plan. Take things easy for 21 straight days, but do them consistently. Then at the end of this introductory period, you'll have a well ingrained habit that can last you a lifetime!

After those 21 days, you can start to increase your workout (or whatever). But make the commitment you'll start small and do it for 21 straight days. If you miss a day, start over until you've accomplished 21 days in a row.

Final Step

This seems pretty easy, huh? You won't believe what a difference it will make too! After you've ingrained your first habit, it's time too...

Start your next challenge!

Whether that's improving the habit you have already ingrained. Or, getting started working on your next habit. Keep building momentum and strive to improve a little bit each and every day.

You absolutely won't believe how much this simple formula can do for you in only a few months time. You'll be on a path to shed tons of pounds, earn lots of money, or whatever it is you desire. Anything in life can be yours if you follow through on the personal development plan process!

As I mentioned in If I Can Teach You Just One Thing, It Would Be This, doing a little bit every day adds up to a whole lot over time! It's time you learn this for yourself.

Write up a personal development plan right now (it will only take 15 minutes). Follow through on it for just 1-2 months. And be sure to let me know when you realize it's been one of the best decisions you've ever made in your life!

Update: Check out my example personal development plan.

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