What is personal planning?
It’s January (yes, still – I know, it can seem endless sometimes) and the month where everybody seems to be waffling on about New Year’s Resolutions, setting goals and generally becoming a better person. By now, of course, most of those resolutions will have fallen by the wayside, as the endorphins created by spending time pleasing yourself over Christmas fade away and reality bites.
BUT! Now is actually a really good time to do some personal planning, or, in other words – work out what you want to achieve in 2025 and how you’re going to go about it. You’re not filled with false energy, you can see exactly how much time and energy you have to commit to change, and you can be realistic about what you want to achieve and by when.
How do you go about personal planning?
Personal planning is, in brief, the process of setting goals and making plans to achieve them. However, when we think of personal planning our minds generally head in one of two directions – work, or health (alcohol limits and weight loss being top of the list). In fact, you can break down personal planning into
Types of personal planning
- Personal financial planning
Here, you assess your current financial situation, set goals, and create a plan to achieve them.
- Personal development planning
This means you identify your needs for your career, set goals, and create a plan to achieve them.
- Personal care planning
This is health-related personal planning, where you identify your needs or wants, set goals, and work out how to achieve them.
The six steps of personal planning
Before you start on your plan, decide if you want to address all the three types of personal planning at once, or take them one at a time. Throwing yourself into everything at once might actually have the opposite effect to the one you’re seeking, as the risk is you will become overwhelmed, and not hit your targets as you want to. It’s best perhaps to address one plan at a time,
First, invest in a notebook. Then sit with a pen and prepare to make notes. You can do it all on your laptop, but the action of sitting somewhere comfy, relaxed and easy, and using a pen to make notes and scribble ideas actually helps bring out the best thinking, often.
- Reflect on your current situation
If you’re choosing to focus on Personal Financial Planning, this is a quick one – write down your dreams for retirement, for home ownership (what, where, when) and book an appointment with your financial advisor. If you don’t already have one, or the one you have you just don’t click with, find a new one. Ask your friends, parents and colleagues for recommendations, or search for accredited and registered financial advisors in your area.
If you’re considering Personal Development Planning, this is the moment where you take a good, even brutal, look at your life and your career and ask what is making you happy, and what is not. Make a list of the good things (everything from children and relationships to the smallest things like hot buttered crumpets with Marmite) and then make a list of the things that really don’t engender feelings of contentment.
It’s a similar process for Personal Care Planning. In this case, be sure to list the things you are happy with, from weight or diet to your skincare regime, then look at the things you may not be so happy with, from weight and diet to your skincare regime…
- Clarify your values
What does this mean? It really means just being honest with yourself – what amount of effort are you really and truly prepared to put in to making change? And what are your motivations? WHY do you want to start exercising? Is it just to get fit, or is it to benefit your overall health so you are setting the right example to your children, and can be around longer for them? With this in mind, move on to step 3.
- Set goals
Being completely honest with yourself (see step 2) you now need to set goals, and an end date by which they should be accomplished.
- Write a plan that reflects your goals
Identify steps to achieve your goals and write them in a table. If it’s weight loss, for example – how much and when? Be kind to yourself – anybody who has been on a weight loss journey will tell you that at first the weight just falls off, then suddenly they hit a plateau and all motivation to keep going goes out the window. Let your goals reflect this and remember what you noted in step 2.
If you’re focussing on career goals in your personal plan, you may need to have this discussion with your manager or HR department, so you can find out about such things as taking courses or studying for professional qualifications, or participating in in-house training workshops. You can also look into undertaking independent study, networking, or even study and networking in a new field that might help you make a side-ways step into a whole new career.
- Monitor your progress
Transfer your handwritten table to your laptop (personally, I love a nice, neat spreadsheet) and check in every month to ensure you’re meeting your targets and building towards achieving your end goal. If things are slipping ask yourself why, don’t just throw the towel in. Maybe it’s forces beyond your control – your workplace hasn’t run that course you need yet, for example, or you’ve had an injury that has slowed your exercise plan. If you have really deep-dived into your values and motivations you will have set reasonable, achievable goals and be well on your way to ticking them off as complete.
Finally, if you have tried all this before, and just haven’t managed to make the change you want, if things slip too easily by the wayside, consider partnering up with someone. You don’t have to have the same goals, you just need to be there for each other to drive each other on, to celebrate the wins and work through the set-backs. Is there a friend or colleague who might be your PP Buddy? Will one of the directors or a senior manager agree to be your mentor? Or, perhaps, would a life coach be the extra cheerleader you need to really make change?
If you want it, you can find a way to make it happen.
Eddie – Friday 24th January 2025.
