Moving Forward in Life: Create Your Personal Growth Plan

Do you feel like you’re not moving forward in life? If you feel stuck, you’re far from alone. Feeling stuck is a common problem that many people experience in various phases of their lives. The reason we feel stuck is simple: we’ve reached a point in our life where we’re long overdue to grow.

If the answer for why we don’t feel successful is so simple, then why wouldn’t more people be able to achieve the level of success that they want? The process to reaching your goals may be simple, but I didn’t say it was easy. This is what frightens so many of us from ever trying.

Perceived pain from the hard work that will follow a commitment can seem intimidating. As if the hard work doesn’t seem hard enough, we also tend to fear the time it may take out your day that you would rather spend on short-term pleasures or goals.

However, progress is the purest form of motivation there is. If you commit now, you’ll see that the pain is only temporary. Not only that; you’ll see that the satisfaction gained from doing it is so much better than the short-term comfort of not doing it.

What does success mean to you, anyway?

Success runs far deeper than simply feeling happy, because there are lots of things in life can make us feel happy, but how long that lasts can vary. It can seem so difficult to have when we tend to hand the keys to our happiness to short-term goals, other people and what they want for us, or sometimes even worldly things.

Those special keys don’t belong to anyone else but you. (However, the one person you adore most gets their own copy.) 😉

As long as you fall into the thought pattern of, “I will be happy when…” You will never feel like you’re moving forward in life. Success is not made up of a specific set of ideals that, once you achieve them, you’re set for life. Success is your entire lifestyle!

We each have a personal blueprint made up in our own minds for what success means. You laid the ground work for your unique idea of success. Over time, it was molded and refined by role models, inspiration, and other influences such as friends and family.

Is success about having an abundance of money? Is it about beautiful cars, huge houses, and wearing the latest fashions? Or is it having a loving, strong marriage with happy children? Having these things seem like they might contribute to a person’s happiness, and they might for a time – but they are only small slices from the pie of life.

There are many wealthy people who have all of the luxuries that money can buy, yet they are still miserable people. The quote, “Success is not a destination, but a journey”, as said by Zig Ziglar and many others, speaks to me personally as a phrase worth living by. 

Why? Because it addresses that our success and happiness doesn’t hinge on achieving something great. While achieving lots of great things may boost your self-satisfaction more than achieving one, success doesn’t hinge on the idea of that, either. Not quite, anyway.

So, what does make a person feel like a success? How can you acheive self-satisfaction and true happiness? The answer is just as easy as the first: Growth. This is why you need a personal growth plan.

What is a personal growth plan? This means committing to a detailed game plan for how to gain the courage to change, and discovering what steps you’ll need to take to get from where you are to where you want to be.

Moving forward in life: How a personal growth plan can make you feel more like a success

Accomplishments that have provided you with long-term satisfaction feel that way because you grew in the process. Creating a personal growth plan assures that we will continue to feel long-term fulfillment. 

When we achieve something that aligns with what we value most, we feel like we’ve grown as a person. We pushed our limits and feeling like a bigger person than we were before it.

However, we all know that the satisfaction gained from an accomplishment is so often temporary… This is why we need to accomplish something every day. Regardless of whether you’ve earned your first million dollars, or you’ve finally gotten the job you wanted, everything else in your life is still just the same.

Graduating with a bachelor’s degree may have grown your mind. It also may have shown you that you have far more patience and persistence than you once thought. However, it obviously hasn’t improved your relationship with your partner, or improved your finances.

Without stepping outside of our comfort zone in every aspect of life, we can’t grow. If we can’t grow in more than a few ways, we won’t feel successful.

Take the time to read through the framework below of a personal growth plan, and start tailoring it to you.

Your personal growth plan: 4 simple ways to keep growing and moving forward in life

1. Take a look at your life on paper.
   Separate your life into different aspects: Relationships, Finances, Career, Health, and your personal joy. The first assignment on your new personal growth plan is to ask yourself some questions. Start with this one: Which of these aspects do you feel that you’re doing well in? Which of these do you direct the most focus and energy on? You may find that there is quite a lot of overlap in your answers to those two questions. On the other hand, the aspects that you give less attention to are likely to be the ones that need improvement the most.
2. Your habits define your success.
   Nobody who is what we conventionally describe as “successful”, whether wealthy or healthy, got there without creating habits that would keep them in the right direction. Even though hard work seems like an obvious solution, this, too is something that needs to be made into a habit before any results will be seen. To start moving forward in life, it’s important to realize that the state of your success is not because of circumstances. It’s a direct product of the habits you’ve chosen to make into a priority. Answer this: What habits can you add to your day to get closer to your goal every day?
3. If you’re interested in change, the next step is to be committed to it.
   It’s important to know the difference between the two! If you’re interested, that means you’d like to grow; nothing more, nothing less. If you’re committed, that means you WILL grow, no matter who or what may try to stand in your way, even the fear of pain or hard work. Answer this: Are you just interested in growth, or are you committed?
4. Make your ‘shoulds’ into ‘musts’.
   If you’d like your blog to make some money this year, should you research what you need to do to accomplish that? Should you spend more time with your family, or must you? Until your ‘shoulds’ become ‘musts’ in your mind, you will only treat them as such, and your results will reflect that. Answer this: Which of my ‘shoulds’ can I change into ‘musts’ to start moving forward in life?

Moving forward in life is not a complicated recipe. All it takes to get started is knowing what you want. From there, learn everything you can about it. Then, build habits that help you achieve it, and turn that knowledge into action!

Build the foundation of your personal growth plan on this principle: As long as you can go to bed each night saying that you’ve grown by at least 1%, your happiness and self-satisfaction can only keep growing!