During your life, you’ve developed a few ideas and even formed some beliefs and
established values around those ideas. Sometimes those ideas are simply wrong. They
may feel right due to your own experience in life thus far, but often, they are very
subjective and not an actual indicator that everyone will experience the same thing.
Sometimes fears develop that can cause roadblocks on your path to success.

Get You Out of Your Comfort Zone – One thing that can get in the way of success is
sticking to comfort zones. If you’ve never gotten up in front of a group and talked to
them about what you know, how do you really know you dislike and fear public
speaking? A personal development plan can help you take steps to work on your fear,
such as by joining a speakers’ group or hiring a coach.
Builds Your Confidence – With a good personal development plan you’re going to go
swimming with the sharks first thing (unless that’s your jam), but you will slowly collect
successes that will energize you to keep going. As you experience more joy in life, your
confidence will become stronger and enable you to let go of some fears. If you don’t
have a heart attack giving that talk at Toast Masters, you probably won’t have a heart
attack at that meeting.
Increases Self-Awareness – One of the problems most of us have is not being self-
aware. It’s hard sometimes to look to ourselves to find out how we can personally
change to improve our career, work, business, relationships, and so forth. When you
become aware that something, you’re doing is making things happen the way they are,
you can take control of it. For example, if you go to networking events and never meet
anyone why? Are you sitting at the same table, what the same people? Did you go to
the event with a plan? The self-development plan will address this because the moment
you know about the event, you’re going to do a SWOT, and you’re going to figure out
how to dominate that networking event.
Helps You Develop Plan B – Everyone must start with an assumption, and often they
are wrong. You do your best research, and you act with confidence, but it’s still wrong.
A personal development plan is going to help you identify areas that need a plan B to
avoid any problems and bottlenecks for anything you want to accomplish.
Ensures You Confront Your Fears – Some fears are smart. For example, there is no
reason to run around at night walking into dark areas of town in most places. The fear
you have about that is protecting you. However, if you have a fear of judgment, you
might never get that product in your shopping cart ready for sale. Your lack of
confidence has caused a fear of failure, and you tend not to get things done, but you
have lots of ideas. A personal development plan will ensure you realize this is
happening consciously and allow you to create steps to combat that fear.
Notes Any Progress You’ve Made – Because you don’t just create your plan once and
end it, it’s an ongoing process, you will want to periodically go through any plan you’ve

created and note that you did it so that you can move on to a new plan. When you
acknowledge your success and even study your failures, you will be that much more
ready to experience success again.
Helps You Redefine “Fearless” – An excellent personal development plan will help
you redefine what it means to be fearless. It’s not as cut and dried as you think. It also
might not even be necessary. You can feel fear and act anyway.
Your personal development plan will help you overcome your fears because the
personal development plan was designed to help you think differently. A personal
development plan helps you become more self-aware to notice what you can do
differently to achieve your goals, including overcoming fears.