3 Things You Can Do Right Now To Help Your Personal Development This Year

Goal setting, achievement, and personal development can be closely related. Some of your goals for this year may be related to your personal growth, and that is excellent. In other cases, leaders keep those independent of each other. When that is the case, much as you do with your goals, taking time for reflection on what you have achieved for yourself this year is equally as important.I recently shared several ideas for completing a midyear reflection session for your goals, which may be helpful for this as well. In addition, I thought I would share some quick activities you can take right now to help jump-start your personal development for the second half of this year.

Assess the year so far - what have you done for yourself? Write 1 paragraph about what you want to accomplish in the next six months for yourself

Assessing the year so far is a good start to understand and celebrate what you have already accomplished. If the well is a little dry, don’t beat yourself up. We all get busy, and it is easy to place our personal goals behind other tasks that come up on a day to day basis. This activity is about what will you do from here, going forward.Take a few minutes to write down a paragraph or two on what you want to do in the coming months. If you faced obstacles to making time for your own development in the first six months of this year, what will you do differently in the next six months to free that time up? When you take time to reflect again in December and prepare for the new year, what will success look like to you at that point? Capture those images in your writing, keep them someplace you can refer to regularly, and then be ready to celebrate in December.

Select one thing you will do in the next 24 hours that is self-development focused

Getting going is the only way to move forward. Writing, planning, and strategizing about what needs to happen is important, but you have to get the motion started. After writing your paragraph about what you want to accomplish in the coming months, select one action, regardless of difficulty, to get the ball rolling. Something you will do in the next twenty-four hours. It might be as simple as purchasing the book you have been meaning to read. Make that purchase and know that you have already started that activity. Perhaps it is selecting and downloading a podcast. That first action of searching iTunes for something that might interest you will be the beginning of your learning journey for the immediate future.

Write a sticky note of 1 thing you will accomplish for yourself by the end of next week

Now that you have that first action established, take the next step and write yourself a sticky note about one thing you will do in the next week to act on your development plan. Again, this doesn’t have to be complicated or grandiose, just the next step on what you are doing for yourself. Place that sticky note where you can see it each day for the next week. It will serve as a reminder for that action you want to take and when you accomplish that it will become a visual reminder that you took something off your plate. The real win will be getting some momentum behind your efforts to develop yourself.These are simple steps that can help remind yourself that what you do for you is as important as what you do for others (if not more so). Sometimes we get lost in the bigger picture of what we want to accomplish - for example, read that new book you have been thinking about - and we worry about the time it will take to read it. Instead of taking the simple first step of buying the book, we get caught up in the timing and planning necessary for reading. One thing is certain; you cannot read if you do not have the book. Then it may be as simple as stating you will read the first page, just to get started. It can be that simple. So, take the first step and begin by writing where you want to be and then act on what you know will be the initial action to get everything else going.What was your small first step to jump-start your personal development for the second half of the year?Join other retail leaders in continuing their development journey with Effective Retail Leader.com. SUBSCRIBE today to receive FREE leadership tips directly to your inbox and monthly newsletters that provide many tools to help further develop your leadership skills all at no cost. JOIN NOW!No spam ever - just leadership goodness.Photo by Lucie Capkova on Unsplash