Why Self-Development Plans Don’t Work and How to Fix It

You’ll find thousands of articles and hundreds of books on how to make a personal self-development plan and become the best version of yourself, but they all have one pitfall – they rarely succeed. Why? Today, I’ll tell you 10 reasons why those plans fail and how to make them work.

Integrate Self-Development Plan into Your Everyday Routine

A one-year self-development plan won’t work if you forget about it as soon as you write it down. Self-development is an ongoing process that requires you to take daily actions. For instance, if you want to pump up your abs or learn a new language, you must do it regularly. Therefore, a self-development plan not integrated into your daily schedule is doomed to fail. Make a schedule that regularly moves you toward your self-development goals to make a plan work. If you want to build abs, plan your workouts at the beginning of the week. If you’re going to learn a new language – put the time in your schedule for learning grammar and new words, and practicing it.

Consider Your Resources

The plan will fail when you make it without considering your capabilities and resources (time, money, valuable acquaintances). For example, you plan to learn a new language for 2 hours a day, even though you are busy at work until 7 pm every day. Or you want to learn programming with an online course in 3 months, although you are bad at exact sciences. You might need more time and can’t manage without a teacher. To make the plan feasible, adjust it to your resources.

Replenish your Energy Resources

If you don’t have the energy for self-development, even the most thoughtful plan will collapse. In the previous paragraph, I discussed considering your resources when planning. However, some resources are difficult to evaluate at the plan-making stage, and one of them is energy. You may be full of energy one week, and the following week you’ll be devastated that you won’t accomplish a single point in your self-development plan. To increase your chances of success, take a few regular actions to replenish your resources – go to bed on time, take a walk in the fresh air, enjoy your favorite hobby, or meet up with friends.

Don’t be Afraid to Fail

It’s better to accomplish the plan today than to execute everything flawlessly but next month. So often, we are afraid to take a step to avoid failure, but failing is an experience that keeps you moving forward and gaining confidence.

Look at any successful person, and you will realize their “success” is just a mountain of failures. Setbacks are a necessary springboard to success, so don’t be afraid to execute your plan today.

Adapt a Ready-Made Plan to the Real Circumstances

You can make an ideal self-development plan, but circumstances often change and interfere with the goal, which is why adapting is so important. Review your self-development plan and courageously modify it if new circumstances arise or other conditions change. For example, you read self-development books in print and progress very slowly because you can’t carry them around – try e-books or audio versions. Or you go to the gym but don’t like it – find another option to keep yourself in shape. For instance, try yoga, dance, or pilates classes. If something doesn’t work well, change your instruments and look for other ways to achieve your goal.

Create a System

A system makes the goal achievable and serves as a supporting framework, guiding us step by step. Any action you take daily is a system, and if the goal can be visualized as a distant island you want to reach, the system is the map that will guide you toward it. If your goal is “read 3 books for self-development,” a system might be “read 30 pages per day.”

Break a Big Goal into Parts

You may never take that first step if you set a big goal that takes months to achieve. Goals like “get your body in shape,” “publish a book,” or “read the best self-development books” are so massive that they can’t be achieved in a few days or a week. When we face such goals, we don’t know how to approach the task and begin to procrastinate. To achieve a big goal, you must divide it into many small steps that take hours to accomplish. For example, the purpose of “writing a book” can be broken down into three stages: choose a topic, write an outline, write one chapter, write the next chapter, etc. Step by step, you can tackle even the most significant tasks.

Use a Trigger to Create a Habit of Following your Plan

It’s hard to remember your self-development plan every day, so it’s easier to create a trigger to start that habit. For example, you want to review your plan every morning. To keep that in mind, choose a trigger – any of your daily activities that your brain will associate with the new habit. For example, if you start each day with a cup of coffee, tie a new habit to that ritual. In other words, your morning cup of coffee will become the trigger for the habit of reviewing your self-development plan. Each time a trigger precedes the habit, our brain reinforces the connection between the habit and the corresponding trigger. As a result, the new habit becomes automatic, and you will find it increasingly easier to stick to it.

Set Deadlines

A plan will fail if you don’t set specific deadlines for each task. Without a deadline, you will always feel that there is still plenty of time, and you can do these tasks later — the same problem with extended deadlines. For example, if you schedule tasks in January and make a plan for the year, you probably won’t start most of them until next October. So to keep yourself on track and artificially create more than one “new year,” try quarterly planning. Set goals for 3 months and set deadlines for each month to increase the chances of success.

Monitor your Progress

Following a plan is hard if you don’t track your progress. That way, you won’t know if you’re moving toward your goal or standing still, how effectively you worked on your personal development last week, and what tools are most effective. To keep track of your progress, take stock at the end of the day, week, and month. Analyze the reasons for wins and failures, draw conclusions, and change your strategy. Finally, write down your victories to keep yourself motivated!