6 Steps That All Personal Development Approaches Cover

All personal development books, courses, programmes and other media, consist of the same basic steps.

Generally speaking, some are stronger in some areas than others, and some have more emphasis and detail on some areas than others, but they all follow the same fundamental steps.

This is my first attempt to summarise the key steps. If there are any I've missed please let me know by adding a comment!

1. Work out where you are
2. Work out where you want to be
3. Work out how you're going to get there
4. Change your mindset
5. Take a lot of action and keep re-aligning your actions with where you want to get to
6. Persevere, repeat steps 1-5 as many times as it takes

For each of these steps there are a wide variety of techniques and tools that can be employed, and there are even books on each individual one of them. Below I've included a very brief summary of what each one involves. I would recommend reading more specific material (including some of the posts and books recommended on this blog) or details on each.

1. Work out where you are

This is the "self-assessment" or "life temperature-check" that is vital an absolutely vital step towards the self-awareness necessary to decide what action to take first.

You need to be completely open and honest with yourself so that you can start make informed decisions based on an understanding of the gaps in your life.

I wrote a bit about some frameworks you can use for this here: http://business-life-success.blogspot.com/2009/06/balanced-personal-and-career-goals.html

2. Work out where you want to be

This is all about setting goals. Without an idea of where you're going, it's not possible to:

• Ensure any actions you take are in the right direction
• Know whether you are making good progress towards your goals or not
• Know when you've got to where you want to get to

3. Work out how you're going to get there

There are a couple of parts to this.

One is to take the pie-in-the-sky, green-field, ultimate wishes that provide you with a trajectory and map out those milestones to getting there, with a timescale.

The other is the set of closer actions you need to take, aligned to those longer-term ones, that help you see where you're aiming and give you a starting point that you know will eventually lead to your ultimate aims.

In my experience, making lots of little short-term plans that are easy to achieve and actually doing them is the most effective way to push things forwards. Making lots of long term plans but doing nothing gets you nowhere. Moreover, the more action you take the better and more realistic your plans get, the more you accelerate and quicker you get to where you want to go.

4. Change your mindset

There are books after books on this subject. From positive affirmations, to hypnotism, to general life-rule-type recommendations, this is all about breaking out of your limiting beliefs and realising that anythings is possible.

All of this is great, motivating stuff, but is often the kind of material that leads to a lot of big dreams and no action.

Trust me - taking action is the best way to change your mindset, because the minute you actually see changes in your life you will start to believe without needing to read some book to tell you how to change your beliefs...

5. Take a lot of action and keep re-aligning your actions with where you want to get to

This is easily the most important step. Taking action is the thing that changes everything.

Taking action will also completely change your view on your goals and your feeling about what is possible.

My recommendation would be to keep your overall goals in mind but keep a focus on those short-term goals: keep re-writing them and doing them. The more you achieve, the more you will try to do, the more realistic your longer-term goals will feel and the bigger your aspirations will become.

6. Persevere, repeat steps 1-5 as many times as it takes

The final point is to repeat, repeat, repeat.

Perseverance is really important - the more you do something, the better you will get at it, the more you will believe it, the further you will be able to go.

We are all human beings and all get knocked back by things at times, but keep it up and you will succeed: our success will never be based on how well we do in good times, but how well we respond to challenges and overcome obsticals to succeed during harder times.