Personal Development Plan – Setting Your Vision

1. What have you learned about yourself so far?
2. What do you hope to gain by doing this plan? (What life or professional issues are you tackling by doing this personal development plan?)
3. What is your vision/goal for this plan? (Why is this personal development plan topic important to you?)

As appropriate, you are encouraged to bring in information you gleaned from the self-assessments you have done so far.

1. What Is Your Jungian Typology?
2. How Productive Are You?
3. Locus of Control
4. Are You Experiencing Burnout?
5. Stress Scale

The last two weeks have taught me about who I am as a person. The five assessments that I have taken so far have helped to illuminate the areas in which I need to work to improve myself as well as the areas that I am successful in. Prior to these assessments I believed that I was a shy person, who was well organized, extremely productive, with high stress levels. I now know that I have an ISFJ personality and that I have a strong preference of introversion over extraversion, a slight preference of sensing over intuition, a moderate preference of feeling over thinking, and a moderate preference of judging over perceiving. The productivity test taught me that while I am on the right track with my productivity efforts I could still be more productive. The Locus of Control self-assessment indicated that I have a moderate internal locus of self-control. The Burnout Self-Test assessment results indicated that I may be at risk for burnout. My score on the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale assessment means that I have only a low to moderate chance of becoming ill in the near future due to stress. The textbook and my results on the self-assessments have now taught me that while I am on the right track to being a successful person I still have room to improve and there are still some areas of myself that I need to reflect on.

The self-assessments have unearthed both good and bad qualities about myself. There are three main areas that I need to focus more on in order to improve myself as a person:

1. Public Speaking: Public speaking is an issue that I have always struggled with. My ISFJ personality and my strong preference of introversion over extraversion has made public speaking difficult for me. It does not matter how much I practice my speech in advance I still end up feeling self-conscious, jittery, and nervous when it is time for me to present; these feelings do not dissipate throughout my speech and by the end of it I end up feeling exhausted.
2. Organization: I used to believe that I was a well-organized person prior to the productivity self-assessment. My worst areas on the assessment were organization, delegation, and productive systems. This was a bit of a wakeup call for me and I plan to use this knowledge about myself to work on improving my organization.
3. Delegation: Delegation has always been difficult for me at work. I always end up feeling like I need to do everything myself. The need to control everything is a side effect of my moderate internal locus of self-control. It is something I need to work on to avoid leaving people feeling "trampled" or "bruised" and so that I do not elevate my stress level which could result in my becoming ill in the near future.

My goal in creating a personal development plan for myself is to learn about my weaknesses and to create a plan for how to turn them into strengths. Working on this personal development plan has helped to illuminate my strengths, weaknesses, and failings. I have found the creation of this personal development plan beneficial to myself because it has forced me to reflect on the areas that need improvement. Using this plan I can come up with strategies for how to fix the areas that I need to improve upon before they negatively affect me and my future career.