A Professional Development Plan to Level-up Your Life

What do Elon Musk, Pavel Picasso, and Ben Franklin all have in common? Besides absolutely rocking each of their fields they were in, it's that they all had personal and professional development plans to level up their life. Do you have a professional development plan? You should, and in this video, I will help you create yours. Hyper-capable people work non-stop on their skills, plans, and goals, and they don't just work on their work. They also work on themselves. How can we do this systematically, efficiently, and productively? Introducing the professional development plan. Professional development plan is a roadmap containing the skills, strategy, and education you need to further yourself in career and life to achieve your professional goals. Professional development is traditionally associated with careers like teaching, but it's also something that everyone can and should be utilizing. When you look at the highest achievers in history, the Elon Musks, the Jeff Bezos, the Teslas, the Franklins, the Twains, the Da Vinci's, and every Olympic athlete, they all achieve their professional development through discipline, education, and planning. In the words of Jim Rohn, if you don't design your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's plan, and guess what they have planned for you? Not much. Let's get started on your professional development plan, or as I quickly call it, your PDP. You can also get our downloadable worksheet at scienceofpeople.com slash PDP. It will help you implement the steps I'm about to walk you through. The first step, self-analysis. I get you. Most likely, you're the type of person seeking to achieve hyper capability in your given field of passion or work. I like to define being hyper capable as having the knowledge, resources, and actionable tactics to achieve the goals, life, and the dreams you desire. So as we work on a professional development plan for you, before we move forward towards goals and actions, you need to know who that self is. According to Harvard Business School, successful people are good at matching their goals with their own skill sets. So first, you have to self-analyze. You want to examine your skill sets, your strengths, your weaknesses, your habits, your desires. Get out a fresh piece of paper or download our free PDP worksheet, and let's get started. What do you love to do? What are you best at? What would people pay you for? Hint, it can be great to ask your biggest cheerleaders for input with this. List your top three strengths first. Be honest and put humility aside for the moment. Got them? Then comes the harder part. Next, list your weaknesses. What do you loathe doing? What would you rather clean bathrooms instead of doing? What are you just not that great at? Write them down now. After listing those, ask yourself where you are at now. Where do you want to be? What pops into your mind with these fill-in-the-blanks? Right now, I'm... I want to be... It's not until we're aware of what we need that we can then work on something. Okay, now that we've adequately soul-searched, let's move on to step number two. The second step, setting quality goals. You need a goal, a vision, an end. Once you have a solid goal, we can work backwards and research continually shows that people who have goals are more successful. As one Wharton article says on achieving high performance at work, the number one most powerful factor is setting fewer bigger goals. Do you notice that research said fewer? Lots and lots of goals is not the goal. Aim for higher quality and less quantity. You don't want to get bogged down on setting too many goals, but rather you want to pick a few big goals to work towards. In relation to the previous step, once you know your strengths and weaknesses, you'll be able to see where your gaps are and gaps are just identifiers of where you need to go. In other words, gaps can be goal identifiers, and that's one of our big pillars in the science of goal-setting. For example, let's say public speaking isn't your greatest strength. A goal could be to book one event in the next three months where you speak in front of people. This doesn't have to be the Toastmasters or Big Keynote, but maybe there's a meetup of local business owners or entrepreneurs, and you can go there and introduce yourself to a room full of people. Or maybe there's even an open mic night you can speak at. The key is that if public speaking isn't your greatest strength, you would create a goal to work on it and chip away at it every single month. And one more thing, you want to take time to write down your goals. Try to tie them to your strengths and weaknesses. Do the following exercise. What is one goal that utilizes one of my strengths? What is one goal that can help me improve a weakness? One 2015 study by psychologist Gail Matthews shares more than 70% of the participants who sent weekly updates to a friend reported successful goal achievement completely accomplished their goal or more than half the way there compared to 35% of those who kept their goals to themselves. So share your goal. Write your goal down. Tell a friend. Make that goal impossible to ignore. The third step, focus, focus, focus. This step can feel like the hardest one in our cell phone addicted, tweet-loving, Insta-story age. A time where everything around us is trying to steal our attention and our focus. Focus is such a valuable asset and something you should be working on for peak productivity. One New York Times article reported on research where people were distracted by messaging interruptions while performing a task. The interruptions made the participants 20% dumber on the test they were taking. That's enough to turn a B- into 62% of failure. If you want to be successful, you have to minimize distractions and stay focused. Focus is one of the most valuable assets you can have, but it takes some focus to work on focus. From the previous step, once you have your goal, you need to be able to really dial into working on it in a productive, effective, and focused way. You want to try to engage in what Cal Newport calls deep work. The Wharton School at UPenn shares this about deep work. To produce at your peak level, you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Now, this doesn't mean you need to work six hours straight on a single task, but it does mean you should focus on a specific task at a time rather than multitasking or trying to do ten different things at once. A very popular method of focus is called the Pomodoro Technique. What you do is set a timer and give yourself a small time limit to work extremely focused on a given task, typically about 25 minutes, and then take a short break, usually about five. This gives your mind a momentary rest. During your task time, you should have your phone off, close all other windows, and put a note on your office door. Give that task everything you've got for 25 minutes. On your five-minute break, do whatever you like. Run free, eat a Pop-Tart, take a dance break. Then you get right back to it. The process of working with intense focus for 25 minutes and then taking a quick break is healthy for the brain and actually leads you to more productivity. When you get that small reward of a break, it helps your mind go back to focus and get rid of all those normal distractions. It's a fact. Focused work helps you get closer to your goals faster. The fourth step, a great morning routine. The morning should be your diving board for the day. It sets you up for success. Tim Ferriss, a global expert in analyzing, interviewing, and sharing the habits of the highest performers and most successful people in the world, often talks about the power of morning routines. Over and over again, he's found the most successful people across industries and talents all have a specific morning routine. In his words, despite the fact that these are people from tennis, to surfing, to cryptocurrency, to film the blank, some type of morning mindfulness or meditation practice would span 90% of his respondents. There are studies, books, and hundreds of articles written on one of the most unifying of all hyper-capable, high-achieving, high-successful people. They all take complete command and control of their mornings. It's one thing that you can control. I have a whole tutorial on how to create the best morning routine if you need ideas. The most important thing is to be intentional. The fifth step, taking action. It's been the mantra of every self-development guru, philosopher, hyper-capable human since the dawn of time. There are no results without action. Let me say that again, folks. There are no results without action. Once you know your strengths, your goals, have a great morning routine, and you're focused on the task at hand, the only thing that's left is action. True action. Bit by bit, day by day, we create the lives we want. Action ties into goals because so many people just write down their goals, but don't commit to acting upon them. Here's how we can activate your goals. First, set a monthly reminder to write down your three to five monthly goals at the beginning of the month and follow up on what was accomplished the previous month. Here's an example. Let's say these were three of my goals at the beginning of the month. Cold email outreach to 10 new prospects per week, take a local class on networking, schedule and do a headshot photo shoot, and level up my LinkedIn. On the last day of the month, I would open up the document and reflect on the goals. Then I would note down and assess the actions I took on them. Did I actually cold outreach 10 people per week? Who said yes and who said no? Did I Google search and sign up for that network course? How did it go? Should I do another? Did I look for photographers, check out the rates and schedule a photo shoot? Do I have the right outfits? Am I ready to level up? All of those questions will help you reflect on the actions you took. Here's the bottom line. It's never too late to start developing yourself. In the words of Tony Robbins, if you want a great jump in the quality of your life and extraordinary jump in the quality of your life, you've got to set yourself up to win. You got to set yourself up for the process that allows you to consistently grow, constantly enjoy your life and consistently produce the results that you're after. It's time to create your professional development plan so you can be the most incredible and successful you. Set a plan for your next six months. And to help you with it, make sure to grab the science of people PDP worksheet at science of people.com slash PDP. You got this. Are you living up to your full potential? Do you want more? I would love to help you get started with my free training and learn more about people school today. Visit science of people.com slash P school. Here's your next YouTube plan. All you have to do is click one of these fabulous options to start your next step with me. Subscribe, like more, watch more, get more now.