Creating your personal development can help you overcome deeply embedded fears that you may or may not be aware of. 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. Based on these ideas, sometimes fears develop that can cause roadblocks on your path to success.

Developing your very own personal development can help you process through many of those unrealistic fears by providing a framework with guidelines that you can refer to over time. You can literally use your plan as a weapon against those fears and obstacles that attempt to stop you dead in your tracks.

A Few Ways Your Personal Development Plan Can Help You Overcome Your Fears:

Learn the Power of Baby Steps:

When you have a fluid personal development plan in place, you can refer to it in times of fear, panic, and overwhelm. Wherever we step out of our comfort zone and we “feel” a sense of fear. It’s because our sympathetic nervous system, otherwise known as our flight or fight system, has taken over in response to some event or thought. As a result, 3 major stress hormones are released: norepinephrine, cortisol, and adrenaline. If we can actually pause long enough to recognize what’s happening we can begin to override the fear center of the brain known as the amygdala by practicing a deep breathing technique. Stop holding your breath and instead begin to long deep breaths in through the nose and out through the mouth. You then use your breathing to override the fear circuits in your brain long enough to give yourself an opportunity to reframe and refocus. Once you become sure that you’re not going to die if the water bill is late. You can refer to your well-crafted personal development plan and pick one small baby step that you can take action on. Once you do that, you will be overwhelmed with positive brain neurotransmitters and will start making progress on your big goals.

Get You Out of Your Comfort Zone

Now that you have learned how to recognize and overcome the fearful feelings of getting out of your comfort, we can talk about the importance of getting out of your comfort zone. One thing that can get in the way of personal growth and success is sticking rigidly 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,i.e., baby steps.

Helps You To Actually Confront Your Fears 

Some fears are practical.  For example, there is no reason to run around alone at night walking into dark areas of town. 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. 

Build Your Confidence

Confidence builds confidence. With a really good personal development plan, it might feel like you’re swimming with the sharks at first, but you will slowly collect successes that will energize you and cause you to build more and more confidence along the way. As you experience more joy in life, your confidence will become stronger and enable you to let go of some of those fears. For instance, if you don’t have a heart attack giving that talk at Toast Masters, you probably won’t have a heart attack speaking up at your monthly staff meeting.

Increases Self-Awareness 

A huge problem that most of us have is not being self-aware. It’s hard sometimes to look at 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, with the same people every time? Did you go to the event with a plan? The self-development plan will address this because the moment you schedule the event, you’re going to figure out how to dominate that networking event (in a positive way).

Helps You Develop a Plan B

You have to start somewhere with an assumption, but you could be wrong. You do your best research, and you act with confidence, but it still turns out wrong. Now what? A personal development plan can help you identify areas that need a plan B to avoid any problems and bottlenecks for what you want to accomplish.

Notes Any Progress You’ve Made 

Your plan is an ongoing process, therefore, you need to review it periodically noting the progress that you’ve made. When you acknowledge your success and even study your failures, you will be that much more ready to experience success again with minimal fear.

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Your personal development plan will help you overcome your fears because the personal development plan was designed to help you think differently and rise above the negative emotions that keep you stuck. A personal development plan helps you become more self-aware to notice what you can do differently to achieve your goals, including overcoming fears.

Be Well + Prosper

Elaine xx