Personal Development Planning – Step 2 Accept Change

Introduction

One of the more important things you can do for yourself is to accept change for your personal development.  For me the personal development plan is an ongoing activity.  Every 60 to 90 days I review the plan and adjust the plan as needed.

Background

Over the years I have tried to set both personal and career goals for myself.  As I have written before I like to learn and grow.  I use the format of a development plan as a way to help me stay focused.  It has also been a way for me to measure my growth from month to month or year to year.

Today’s blog entry will focus on what is a personal development plan and how to put one in place.  I will be writing a series of blog entries on this topic as I will write a blog entry for each of the four steps.  The four steps are the following:

Accept Change

We all know that the world is changing around us.  There are some things that you can control and others that are beyond our control.  If you do not accept the change, you will spend a lot of time on the activity and are not likely to accomplish your goal.

In the previous blog entry “Identify Need to Change” we identified methods to get a list of areas that need improvement.   For example, one way to get areas of improvement was from a recent annual review.  The following are a couple of tips that I have about accepting change:

  • Avoid Personalization of the need to improve – try to step back from the feedback or criticism that was provided and look for the root cause or area that needs improvement.  At times, the feedback in a review is hard to accept and may feel that the feedback was directed at you personally.  Please keep in mind that it was not you personally but rather the behavior.
  • Accept Change Willingly – For me it is important to accept change willingly.  This is not as simple as it sounds but you need to be willing to change or grow.  It will be less frustrating to accept the fact that you need to change than spending a lot of time trying to convince yourself that you do not have to change. 
  • Don’t Be Afraid – try not to be afraid to change your ways.  As we get older it is easy to think “I have always done it this way”.   But since change is inevitable and to be successful you need to move beyond being afraid of change.  After you accept the need to change you can turn that fear energy into change energy and before you know you will have improved an area that needed improvement.
  • Envision yourself changed – I try to do this to help me see what I would be like after I have implemented a change.  That helps me to accept the change easier.

This should give you a couple of ideas of how to accept change.  In the next blog entry, I will identify the steps that are needed to Create A Plan.

Conclusion

I hope this entry helps you to understand the value in being able to “Accept Change”.  This is the second of four (4) blog entries on the topic of Personal Development Planning.  I will continue this topic with two (2) additional entries to provide more details of the development planning process.    

Tim Meyer
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