Personal Development Plan Sample

How I Structure My Personal Development Plan

I‘ve got a couple of emails lately about how I structure my overall plan for my own development. Although I have a vision statement, goals, an action plan, and a to-do list, I have to admit that I didn’t really have a concrete breakdown of the structure.

So I started sketching out the “big picture.” Pretty soon, I’d gotten way, way too deep into the details and had to remind myself to pull back and chunk up to the big-picture structure and stick to the structure.

The result is my personal development plan sample, shown above. It starts with three main branches:

1. Body
2. Mind
3. Spirit

Body

I put body first in the priorities because here in the physical realm, our whole experience as human beings has a physical foundation. Our ability to do anything, including using the mind, and having spiritual experiences is dependent on the body.

You can’t fully experience your True Self if you mistreat your body with bad (non-)food, or don’t exercise. So in my plan, the next two layers are:

1. Nutrition
2. Exercise

I eat an exclusively whole foods, organic (where possible), mostly vegetarian diet. I also partake in cleanses and detoxification. I’m also going to experiment with a completely raw diet in the coming months. My fiancee is a whole foods expert and wonderful chef, so I’m well looked after there. If you want more info, I’d recommend you check out Sally Fallon for conscious nutrition as well as Don Tolman.

My exercise regime consists of high-intensity, short duration weights (kettle bells) and body-weight workouts. I’ve gotten the best results from doing the bodyrock.tv 30-day challenges (they’re great fun, and free).

Mind

I put “Mind” next because it is only through mastery of mind can we truly experience Self, bliss and at-one-ment. In my own personal development plan sample, this is where I spend most of my time and energy. In this category I have:

1. Meditation
2. Mind Mastery and Education
3. Bio-feedback brain-training

If you’ve been reading my blog for any time now, you know how much I love meditation. It is the path of least resistance toward clearing out the false in one’s conception of reality. It eventually leads to pure experiences of reality such as true love, bliss, presence, pure consciousness and compassion ~ all root feelings without opposite.

What I call Mind Mastery is all the learning that I do that relates to mind, psychology, spirituality, practical philosophy, and neuroscience. When you begin to learn how the brain functions and how the mind organizes things, it speeds up the results of your meditation. The cognitive learning seems to speed up the intuitive and experiential wisdom.

For example, knowing that the brain tends to create, attract, or be attracted to the object of focus, you can train yourself to only think of the things you want, and keep it off those that you don’t want. As a consequence, your reality reflects those things that you prefer in life, over what you don’t.

It also includes becoming crystal clear on your own goals, beliefs (especially those limiting ones), values, strategies and meta-programs. Attaining mastery means eliminating limitations, fears, and anything else that holds you back from your dreams and potential as a human being.

Here’s the secret-sauce: Bio-feedback brain training. In my quest, I became very interested in learning what spiritually enlightened masters were doing with their brainwaves. Research shows that if you can generate similar brainwave patterns, you can experience similar states of being. That was very attractive to me, so I bought specialized EEG equipment and got intensive training.

I now have an advanced meditation session where my own brain-states are ‘fed back’ to my awareness, so I can train closer and closer to the desired states. I read that after a session, a Zen Roshi remarked that this technology would shave 20 years from a students practice. Are you starting to see why I named this site Accelerate Me?

This equipment has also allowed me to develop and test specialized guided meditation recordings that achieve unprecedented levels of consciousness in the listener.

Spirit

Spirit I left for last. We are all energetic, spiritual beings having a physical experience here in this reality. While we are here it is our responsibility to live life to our fullest potential, with love and compassion for others. We are a fractal sliver of the universe, experiencing itself in a life filled with wonder and surprise.

To experience reality, unencumbered by the false, is our highest purpose. And for each of us, that is unique.

Personal Development Means Living Life to the Fullest

In writing your own personal development plan, remember to keep it ‘big picture.’ Chunk it up like mine and keep it simple. You might have different values and different ways of categorizing each element, but so long as it resonates with you, then you’re on the right track.