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SECOND THING If you don’t know where you’re going you won’t know when you get there |
If you don’t know where you’re going you won’t know when you get there. It is important to take some time to put your development activities into a larger perspective. What are you trying to develop, what approaches will you take, and how will you know when you have succeeded? To do this, you need to approach your personal development with a certain degree of thoughtfulness and planning.
Basic development planning is very straightforward—you select a development need, identify some development activity to address it, and arrange to complete the activity. Perhaps someone tells you that you need to be a better team player, or, you have a time management problem. So you sign up for a course. At the conclusion of the course you may feel that you learned some valuable things, but did the course help you meet your long-term development goals? Was that development activity the best way to learn what you needed to learn? If you let your development progress in an ad hoc manner, you won’t be on the most accelerated path to achieving your goals.
On the other hand, if you have a personal development plan—a specific set of needs that you are working on over an extended period—it enables you to make better choices about your development and stay on an accelerated course.
Filed under: Creating a high-impact development plan, Self-Development Tagged: | Executive Education, self-awareness, Self-development Series
