Why Do Many Personal Development Plans Fail?
Before you embark on creating your personal development plan, it’s crucial for you to understand that most people fail at personal development. They fail for a variety of entirely preventable reasons. For that reason, you need to know these roadblocks but only so that you can put something in place to ensure that you don’t make these mistakes.
- Limiting Beliefs – If you have ideas and beliefs that are incompatible with success, it’s important to rid yourself of them. If you don’t believe you can lose weight, become a bodybuilder, write the next great American novel, or whatever it is that is your goal – you can’t. Limiting beliefs become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- The illusion of Action – Sometimes it happens. Something goes wrong and you want to fix it. So, you try to do something, anything! You do all the things you know to do in order to try to stop it. However, you are doing it without a plan in mind and it’s not working. If you feel like you are busy a lot; but, you don’t see many results from all your work, it’s likely due to the illusion of action. One more swipe with the brush on your hair, one more font change on that page, or one more pass through Copyscape all seem like a good idea at first. However if your “one more” try doesn’t produce the results you want, you need to do something differently. In short, you need the right move and not the illusion of action.
- Negative Mindset – If you have the mindset of no matter what good is happening around you that you can always find the negative, then you have a negative mindset. This can kill the hopes of improving your situation. However, it’s not hopeless. You can change it. To let go of negative thoughts, keep a gratitude journal every night.
- Unrealistic Expectations – This is where goal setting comes in again if you have unrealistic expectations, it’s because you have set unattainable goals. There is no point in setting goals out of your reach. Even if someone else can reach that shot, why set yourself up for failure?
- Not Developing Habits – Just as you can develop a bad habit in your life, you can cultivate good habits that pay off. For example, drinking a glass of lemon-water each morning will help you stay hydrated and make your skin look fabulous. To stick to your newly forming habit, you need to turn it into a ritual until it becomes second nature. One day you’ll be excited about your new habit.
- Forgetting Systems & Routines – One way to develop habits is to create systems and routines. For example, if you want to train yourself to toss the unneeded clutter, you’ll need to place trashcans in places where you usually leave items laying around. If you want to start getting up early, set your alarm and put on the other side of the room or far enough away that you can’t hit snooze. These little changes in a system or routine help a lot.
- Lack of Self-Discipline – No plan will succeed if you don’t implement the plan. If you are lacking in discipline, that is one of the first things you need to work on. If you cannot stick to something for the duration of the time it takes to experience success, you will not succeed.
- Not Focusing Enough – One of the signs of adulthood is the ability to wait for gratification. It’s imperative that you can laser focus on a task or a plan for the time required to experience success. If you notice super successful people, they develop tunnel vision for what they want.
- Not Setting Goals Correctly – This can range from not bothering setting goals at all to being vague about your goals. Goals must be very specific to be useful. For example, instead of saying, “I want to learn a new language.” You will state your goals this way: “I want to learn Spanish. To accomplish this, I will learn one new Spanish word each day using the language app for the next year.” Writing down goals correctly will help you develop more clarity in your direction.
- Forgetting the Backup Plan – When you are creating your personal development plan one of the processes is to figure out your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) for any area that you want to improve upon. When you accomplish this, you can create “what if” scenarios so that you’re ready for the backup if you need it.
- Poor Time Management Skills – The great equalizer in life is time. Everyone on earth gets the same number of hours in their day and year. What you do with it is what matters. You cannot change time, but you can try to organize and manage it better. Be realistic about how much time you do any task so that you plan your days better.
Keep these roadblocks in mind as you craft your personal development plan. You can avoid these by knowing they exist and developing a plan to prevent these blocks, while truly developing the best plan for your life.
