A personal development plan is a map of your self development journey. It is basically a goal setting practice, but specifically for the area of personal development. It is for planning your aspirations in regards to personal development. Among other things, it involves identifying what skills you need to learn, the aspects of yourself needs to be improved, abilities that are you lacking and areas which needs to be given priority for improvement.

Although it is in essence a goal setting plan, however due to the nature of personal development, a slightly different approach would be more suitable and effective as opposed to using the goal setting method. Hence, the reason for having personal development plan.

For many people who are serious about success, goal setting is a must. However, many do not set goals for the area of their personal development. People normally have financial goals, health goals, career/professional goals, spiritual goals and relationship goals. However, they do not have goals for their personal development.

The danger in not having personal development goals is as you get more and more caught up in the process of achieving goals, you will unconsciously neglect learning and improving further. Moreover, when people start seeing success, many tend to become complacent and stop their development. It is this complacency that usually causes many successful individuals to consequently fall back and fail.

So one of the main reasons for having a personal development plan is to make sure that we always consistently improve ourselves and prevent complacency from happening. The basic idea behind a personal development plan involves 3 steps;

1. Identify where you are now - Firstly do an analysis of your your major strengths, weaknesses, skills, natural talents etc. This helps you identify which part of yourself you need to focus on.

2. Identify the wanted state - Next you identify where you want to be instead. To achieve your goals, what are the strengths that you need? What are the weaknesses that you must eliminate? What skills or ability do you need to have? What needs to be worked on for you to get to the next level.

3. Bridging the gap - The last step is to develop a plan to bridge the gap between your current state and your desired state as identified in steps 1 and 2. This includes planning what action to take, which resources to obtain, how to get the resource, setting schedules and finally the overall timeline as well as key milestones of your personal development plan.

The basic premise is pretty simple, however it is important that you spend some time on it and come up with a good plan so you'll be headed the right way and not waste any time.

With a personal development plan, you will ensure that you are continually upgrading your knowledge, abilities and skills while also working to eliminate your weaknesses. At the end of the day, it is these factors that determine the level of success you experience in life. All us should have a personal development plan.