Most of us have goals and dreams for our careers that we wish to realize. As with all goals in life, the starting point needs to involve some self-reflection questions. In this article, we’ll address some key questions to help you with your personal development goals for work.
1. What would be the one single personal development goal which would give you the greatest feeling of success?
By discovering the most important goal for ourselves, we can better focus our energy and time on making it a reality. This does not mean that we forgo other goals; but by clarifying what goal means a lot to us, we can focus on the process and stay ‘on the path’ to success.
If you do not have the answer to this question yet, then you are still in the process of deciding your real life purpose. That’s OK. Being open to different work experiences will help those who need to find their primary personal development goal.
2. Is this goal yours or someone else’s goal for you?
I once read an article by a famous professional life coach and public speaker. One line resonated with me; “A life lived through the expectations of others, is a life full of regret and what could have been.”
Do you really own your professional goals? Or are you living out someone else’s expectations? For many people is easier to go with the flow especially when there are family pressures present. This is a slow form of death for the human spirit.
Your professional goals are no less important than any other life goals. They must be deeply held and uniquely yours; almost a message coming from your subconscious mind to will something into being.
3. Are you excited to see your work life succeed?
Do you wake up each day and enthusiastically embrace whatever challenges lay ahead? Few people do! Many of us operate our work life as a semi-conscious routine, and these types of ‘routines’ are rarely exciting.
There will always be routines, however if we set goals with milestones to achieve then we must inject more personal challenges and excitement into the process.
If you cannot to find ways to be passionate about what you do; or you are being deliberately inhibited from setting and achieving your goals, then it is time to change your work environment.
What could you wake up to tomorrow that would make you throw back the blankets and smile in the mirror? Pursuing your deeply held real goals will give you new energy you did not know existed.
For more information on personal development check out the best 11 personal development books.
4. Do you clearly understand what success looks like?
Success at work can be defined in a million different ways. But each one of us should be able to visualize clearly what our own success looks, feels and sounds like. Is success for you an end goal or is it experiencing the process of working towards your goal?
Take some time to think about your past successes. More importantly, think about how those pass successes made you feel. What sort of feeling did they invoke? Were they exhilarating, unusual or even scary.
Spend time working out what your success will look and feel like. Importantly, try to make the process as exciting as finally reaching your destination.
5. What are the daily habits that you will need to adopt to achieve your goals?
Successful people have successful habits. Those habits move them step-by-step each day towards their own personal development goals. By setting up a daily routine that drives you towards your goals you can create (and keep) successful habits.
For example, many successful entrepreneurs will perform mental exercises daily as a way of steering their behaviors towards peak performance. Just as a physical training routine helps us to maintain our performance levels in sport. We all know that routines do not come easily.
We need to force ourselves to think and deliberately do the mental exercises each day before they become a habit. Achieving excellence is rarely natural. It needs to be pursued!
This formula applies when pursuing every goal you aim for. Develop a plan on how to take small daily steps, turn into habits and before you know it your goal is achieved.
6. Self-belief is the cornerstone in the journey to achieving Personal Development at work.
Many people who set goals for their personal development will not actually believe they can achieve the goals they set. They do a good job writing down their goals and planning the steps they need to take, but all the time an inner voice will say that it will not happen. It’s a form of self-sabotage and we have all done it at some stage in life.
If your self-belief mechanism is weak, then you must first work to uncover the source of these beliefs. Often it will be because of fear (in one form or another). You may think that following your passion will not ‘pay the bills’ or you can never be rich because your parents were poor. It can also be as simple as not believing we deserve to succeed.
When our internal processes are aligned with the right self-belief then everything else we require in reaching our goals becomes possible.
Nature is not against you. Success is really in our own hands… if we chose to believe in ourselves.
I hope you enjoyed my article on the personal development goals for work.