- What have you learned about yourself so far?
- What do you hope to gain by doing this plan? (What life or professional issues are you tackling by doing this personal development plan?)
- 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.
- What Is Your Jungian Typology?
- How Productive Are You?
- Locus of Control
- Are You Experiencing Burnout?
- 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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
