Looking for ways to improve yourself? Let these 17 personal development goals inspire your self-development journey!

Each stage in life is so full of change and development… this sure doesn’t stop when you get to adulthood! You are constantly being shaped by the choices you make and the things you experience. The beauty of life is that you can influence growth by taking control and bettering yourself! You can make choices to fine-tune aspects of yourself in order to improve the quality of your life experience. This is called personal development!

Each person and each life journey is unique. Therefore, your personal development plan can be tailored to you specifically. Please use any of these personal development goals to help give you direction for your unique journey.

This post is all about personal development goals! Which one will you begin with?

Personal Development Goals:

1. Increase your self-awareness

Self-awareness is all about understanding who you are. This includes understanding your emotions, your character, and your values. Being self-aware is essential to ensuring that you are making decisions that are in line with who you are. This will ensure that outcomes serve the life that you want to lead and help develop your character in the way that you want.

2. Make peace with the past and move on

Too many people live in the past and let it stop them from enjoying their lives to the fullest. LIFE IS SHORT! This is a skill that can help you gain a bit more enjoyment in life.

Don’t let what happened in the past control your present and your future. Stop obsessing over past events. Learn from your past mistakes and let them help guide you in making changes rather than getting stuck worrying about them. Let that grudge go. Try not to let a bad experience taint the potentially good ones in your future. Give forgiveness where it is needed.

3. Embrace the present

Focus on cultivating greater mindfulness. Mindfulness will allow you to have a greater consciousness of the present point in time. It allows you to recognise, understand and accept thoughts, emotions, or physical responses in that given moment. This enables you to have a deeper connection with yourself in the present and create more fulfilling experiences.

4. Improve your self-talk

This personal development goal is one that is essential to improving your mental health, self-confidence, and quality of life. Self-talk impacts your feelings, your self-esteem, your actions, and your abilities. Therefore, having a mental space rich with positive self-talk is essential for creating a healthy mind for you. Build yourself up instead of breaking yourself down. Be your own cheerleader!

5. Create a healthy mindset

A great self-development goal to link with improving self-talk is working on your mindset. Use your self-talk to help you achieve more of a growth mindset. To have a growth mindset is the idea that your skills and intelligence are not fixed. It is the belief that with perseverance and effort, you can grow and better aspects of yourself. It is the mentality that keeps people resilient through failures or setbacks and sends them toward greater self-confidence and success. So use your improved self-talk to change the way you think about yourself and your skills. Creating and maintaining a healthy mindset is extremely important for your reaching personal development goals.

6. Increase your adaptability

Life is forever changing. Becoming more adaptable increases your ability to adjust to change and thrive in new circumstances. It creates a more satisfied and contented lifestyle and it is additionally a great skill for employment. Allow yourself to be open-minded to change. Sometimes you can get trapped in your ways and this can be a hindrance. Find new ways of challenging yourself and new situations to experience and adjust to.

7. Become more resilient

Alongside adaptability is an equally important skill of resilience. When hardships, times of stress, and adversity occur in life, your level of resilience will determine how well you cope and bounce back from those periods. With increasing resilience, you will be less likely to become overwhelmed and depend on unhealthy coping strategies. Rather you will be able to push through setbacks and the challenges of life by relying on your strengths, abilities, support, and resources.

8. Quit procrastinating!

Hard truth: You are never going to achieve the things you dream of in life if you keep putting them off. Don’t waste your life waiting for the perfect time or the right moment. Do it now! And if you are procrastinating over something boring and unpleasant that you NEED to do, then put your adult pants on and just do it! You will feel so much more accomplished if you just get it out of the way. Completing a task you have been procrastinating over can also help lift that burdening weight off of your shoulders. Building habits of not procrastinating will really help your self-development and improve your success in life.

9. Create opportunities for yourself

Be proactive! The life you are daydreaming of is not going to magically become reality. If you really want something to happen in life you often need to try to make it happen. Persistent effort can bring great results. Work on developing the skill of proactivity so that you can create opportunities for yourself, rather than just sitting passively and responding to life as it comes. Try to take control of the aspects of life that you can while being open to adapting to the aspects you have no control over. This attitude is key to help you achieve your goals.

10. Be smart with self-control

Life is so full of temptations! Social media, unhealthy food, binge-worthy tv shows, a whole internet’s worth of things to buy. Your reward zones in your brain are constantly being overloaded by these things. Unfortunately, self-control is like a muscle, it can tire easily when overused. With the lifestyle that most people lead, it is very easy for our self-control to be exhausted and for us to then give in to temptation. Help your self-control by removing some temptations in your day-to-day. Whether that is putting controls on your access to social media or removing all bad snacks from your household. Exerting self-control a lot less throughout your day will mean that you can exercise it when it counts- helping you to stick to your goals.

11. Develop assertiveness

Gaining assertiveness is one of the great personal development goals for you if you are someone looking to improve your interpersonal relationships. It is an effective and healthy way of communicating because it allows you to voice your thoughts and opinions in a way that is both truthful and respectful to the person you are communicating with. Being assertive also enables you to calmly navigate difficult situations and ensures that the best outcome is achieved for both you and your communication partner.

12. Learn to say “no”

You only have a given amount of waking hours every single day. Do not fill them with things that you do not want to do purely because you feel obligated or are trying to please others. Learning to say no can be difficult but is essential for creating a fulfilling and enjoyable lifestyle. Learn to decline offers politely and offer up alternatives if required. This will allow you to focus your time on the people and things that give the most meaning and value to your life.

13. Choose empathy not sympathy

In order to properly connect with people around you it is important to develop the skill of empathy. Empathy allows you to be sensitive to the emotions of people around you and place yourself in their shoes. By practicing empathy you show understanding of another person’s emotional state rather than pitying them. To pity someone is closely linked to sympathising rather than empathising. Acting with empathy allows you to become a more socially conscious person and makes people around you feel properly heard and understood.

14. Invite more gratitude into your life

Whether it is something big or small, there are plenty of things in everyday life to be grateful for! Recognise and accept the good things in your day and the things that you should be thankful for. Doing this will allow you to appreciate your life and appreciate the people around you more while not taking things for granted. It can also help you develop a more positive outlook on your life and help increase resilience.

15. Recognise when you are wrong

It is okay to make mistakes, you are only human and nobody is perfect. However, if you constantly believe that you can do no wrong and evade responsibility, you are holding yourself back from true self-development. If this is the case, holding yourself accountable for your actions is a great one to add to your list of personal development goals. Instead of turning to a path of denial and blame, try to make it your first instinct to recognise and accept that you were wrong and you made a mistake. From there you will then be able to make amends if necessary, resolve any issues and ultimately learn from the situation.

16. Make an effort to go to bed and wake up earlier

If you are really wanting to work on your other personal development goals, then a great way to do so is to start getting up earlier in the morning. Even if you get up just 10 minutes earlier than you normally would, that is an extra 10 minutes of calm interrupted time to work on the significant yet often neglected things in life like mindfulness. The morning is a time when your mind is rested, calm, and more focused- increase the opportunity to use this time (before all of your commitments of the day start) by getting up earlier. As you’re well aware, sleep is important so if you are going to start waking up earlier, make sure to look after yourself by adjusting your curfew and going to sleep earlier.

17. Commit to yourself

If you want to develop yourself and your life you need to be willing to commit to you yourself. Be consistent in showing up for yourself. Commit to doing one small thing every day that will help you work towards being the person you aim to be and living the life you desire. Look after your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual self so that you will have the energy and dedication to achieve your goals. Make yourself a priority.

“Personal development is the belief that you are worth the effort, time and energy needed to develop yourself.”

DENIS WAITLEY

Let these 17 personal development goals motivate your personal development journey. Use them as they are or change them to suit you- it’s your own unique journey!

Commit to your goals and to yourself, because ultimately you are worth this time you are looking to invest into becoming a better version of yourself!