Setting Goals For Your Personal Development Journey

Personal development is all about you, figuring yourself out, prioritizing your life, setting goals and reaching those goals. We all have things that we want to accomplish and haven’t accomplished yet, but that doesn’t mean we have to leave those dreams and desires on our “someday” list.

As long as you are living, breathing, working and thinking, you can make plans, achieve your goals and change your life. In fact, one of the best ways to live a long and healthy life is to have goals, and this website can help you find yourself, determine your goals and lead the life you have always wanted to lead. This process involves assessing every aspect of your current life, determining where you are now and where you want to be in the future.

Objectively Analyze Your Life

Analyzing your life may sound like a huge task, but it’s really not. The easiest way to analyze your life is to divide it into two categories. Those categories are professional and personal. Your professional life involves your career and everything surrounding your career. Your personal life involves everything that is outside of your career.

Professional Life

You can analyze your professional life by asking yourself a few questions. Are you where you want to be in your job? Do you get along with your coworkers? Do you like your work environment? Are there things you can do to increase your happiness at work? Do you want a promotion? Do you need to change careers? By objectively answering these questions, you can begin to understand your career and your thoughts on your career and set goals for your personal career development.

Personal Life

Your personal life involves everything that isn’t part of your career. This involves your home life and your interactions and relationships with your family members and friends. It involves your personal status. Are you married? Do you get along with your husband or wife? Do you communicate effectively? Do you understand each other? Are you single or divorced and does that bother you? Would you like to meet new people and reenter the dating world?

Your personal life also involves your own personal dreams and aspirations. Do you want to travel more? Do you want to spend more time with your family? Do you want to have more money in the bank? Are you adequately preparing for retirement? Do you want to learn a new skill or pick up a new hobby? Do you want to improve your health? By answering these questions, you are preparing to tackle your personal development head-on.

Career Goals

Your career is half of your life. You spend 40 hours a week at work. Therefore, it’s very important to be satisfied in your career and create goals and objectives and keep moving forward. A stagnant career is a boring and unsatisfying and can lead to feelings of resentment and hatred. It can also increase your stress levels. In order to keep your career on track, you need to set career goals for promotions, coworker relationships and your work environment.

Promotions

Do you want a promotion or a raise? Many people do, but they fail to set goals to achieve the raises and promotions they desire. They think their boss will notice them and offer them a promotion or a raise. A supervisor is not a mind reader. If you never speak up about your desire to advance, your supervisor will assume that you are happy in your current position.

The first step to getting a promotion is to talk to your supervisor. Many people have an irrational fear of talking to their supervisors about raises and promotions. They feel like they’ll be ostracized and disciplined for broaching the subject. However, getting a promotion involves communication, and the best person to explain the promotion process to you is your supervisor. By talking about promotions and raises, you are not asking for either. You are asking how you can accomplish getting a promotion through the company’s current promotional system.

Coworkers

Do you get along with your coworkers? Coworker relationships are very important in the workplace. Even if the work is demanding, great coworker relationships can improve your job satisfaction and your productivity. If you don’t get along with your coworkers, you need to figure out why and improve those relationships. Improving your coworker relationships might be as simple as acting more professional at work or sitting down with specific coworkers and having a frank discussion.

Environment

Do you like your work environment? This is an extremely important question to answer. If you don’t like your work environment, you need to objectively determine why you don’t like it. Is your office or cubicle too small? Do you not like the company culture? Does your boss not listen to you or belittle your ideas? All of these things can lead to a bad workplace environment and stifle your personal development, and depending on your answers to these questions, you might decide that finding a new job is in your best interest.

Finding A New Job

If all of the answers to the above questions lead you to start searching for a new job, set job search goals. This could mean improving your knowledge and marketability through online and classroom-based college courses. It could mean earning a new degree and taking advantage of the college’s career center.

You could also utilize the services of a professional resume writer or a head-hunter. It’s all up to you. After all, you are the one in control of your job search and career, and realizing that you are in control is part of your personal development journey.

Personal Goals

Your personal life is the other half of your development equation, and it’s just as important as your professional life. This aspect of your life involves your personal status, family, dreams, health and finances.

Family

When you have your family loving and supporting you, you can achieve anything. Their support for your dreams and goals can help you achieve higher levels of personal development much faster than if you were on your own.

However, strife at home can impede your ability to think and create viable goals. If this is the case, you need to set goals for improving your family relationships. This can involve improving your communication skills, learning how to effectively discipline your children and spending more time with your husband or wife.

Relationship Status

Personal development includes your relationship status and your feelings toward your relationship status. Are you single or divorced and unhappy about it? Do you want to meet new people and create new relationships? It is possible to meet new people and create new relationships at any age. All you need to do is figure out what type of relationship you want and set goals for meeting new people. This could be as simple as hanging out at a public place and introducing yourself to people you don’t know or picking up a new hobby or interest that involves socialization.

In fact, your desire to change your relationship status can positively affect other areas of your life. If you choose to meet new people through learning new hobbies, you’ll accomplish two goals at the same time. This is called being proactive and productive.

Dreams

What are your dreams? What’s on your bucket-list? What have you not accomplished in your life that you absolutely want to accomplish before you die? These are your dreams, and every dream can be realized. It just takes lots of willpower and determination. Do you want to own your own home? Do you want to move to the beach? Do you want to take skydiving lessons or learn how to dance?

Many people believe that they cannot accomplish their dreams. That’s why they are dreams. However, every dream can be accomplished. If you want to own your own home or move to the beach, make a savings plan, talk to banks and keep a close eye on your credit report. If you want to learn a new hobby or skill, research instructors and classes online and start visiting and talking with those instructors.

The reason most people fail to achieve their goals is the fear of failure. They are afraid to try because they might fail. The only true failure is failing to try. Everything else is just an experience that helps you grow and mature as an individual.

Finances

Most people want more money, or they want to be able to save more. They want to build up their financial portfolios so that they can feel safe and secure now and in the future, but financial success doesn’t happen on a whim. It takes careful planning and goal setting in order to become financially stable.

Financial goal setting starts with creating a household and family budget. A budget should include all of your expenses and all of your income. Income is anything you earn during the month. This can include wages, rental income, child support, alimony and pensions. An expense is anything that shows up in your bank account as a debit or costs you money.

A basic budget involves subtracting your expenses from your income. The remainder of the money is yours to spend. However, if your goal is to become financially stable, you need to create a plan for that extra income. Do you want to create an emergency fund? Do you want to start a savings account? Do you want to diversify your financial holdings with IRAs, stocks and bonds? Determine precisely what you want to do with your extra money, and include those goals into your budget. By budgeting for your IRA accounts, savings accounts, stock accounts and emergency funds, you will be preparing for the future and increasing your financial stability.

Health

Your health is incredibly important in your life. Yet, many people neglect their bodies. Do you need to lose weight? Do you need to eat better? Don’t take your health for granted. If you have ailments, eat poorly or need to lose weight, take control of the situation. You can take control of your health. You just need to wrap your mind around the changes and set goals that you can achieve.

Many people fail to achieve their health goals because they set their goals too high. When they fail to meet they’re goals, they become discouraged and give up. By setting attainable goals, you are setting yourself up to win your health challenges.

If you want to eat better, start by adding healthy foods that you know you like. This could involve swapping out candy bars for a handful of nuts or granola bars. It could include eating a salad once a week or cutting out the chips and dip. Whatever your health goals are, start small and work your way to larger goals. You want to make all of your goals attainable and realistic.

Do I Start With My Professional Or Personal Life?

Where you start is up to you. This is your journey to self-improvement. No one can tell you exactly what to do when it comes to improving yourself. Some people prefer to work on their personal lives first. Others prefer to work on their professional lives, and still others prefer to set simultaneous goals in both categories. Do whatever makes you most comfortable, and don’t be afraid of change or knowledge.

Improving your personal development is a learning process. You will learn a lot. You will try a lot of new things. You will succeed and you will experience set-backs, but you are capable. You can lead a happier and more productive life.

For more information on improving your personal development and changing your life, check out our articles. Our articles contain valuable information on how to meet new people, how to take control of your finances, health and relationships and how to stop procrastinating and realize your dreams.