Professional and personal development, how do they work together? We often hear that you should separate your work life from your private life, but we believe that these two go hand in hand and are in fact dependent on each other. To develop and thrive in your professional life, we believe that you need to be in harmony with your personal life outside of work. To achieve this, we continuously work with a PDP, which our founder has worked with for over 10 years.
What is a Personal Development Plan? A PDP is a document where you write down your personal goals in 8 different categories. We do this every year, with the goal to achieve these by the end of the year. Every goal has a title, description, some milestones, a definition of when the goal is reached and a deadline. The idea is that by writing down your goals on a piece of paper, you will unconsciously start working towards them.
At Naes & Friends, everyone does a PDP and set their goals for the year. To reach these long-term goals, we define a few milestones in order to slowly reach the long-term goals. These milestones are followed up on our planning day every sixth week to see how we’re doing, to motivate each other and sometimes to re-evaluate. Just because you’ve stated a goal doesn’t mean that it can’t change over time. We always make sure to change our goals and milestones if we feel like they no longer align with what we want to do or achieve. Because in the end, we’re doing this for one person only – ourselves.
To get started we usually start by asking ourselves questions such as:
- Is there something that I’ve always wanted to learn but never put time into learning?
- What dreams do I have that feel scary?
- What weaknesses do I have that I want to improve?
- What am I awesome at that I want to get even better at?
One thing we have in common at Naes & Friends it that we believe that as soon as we say something out loud, we get even more motivated to actually fulfill it and make it happen. Us colleagues are each others’ accountability partners. By sharing our goals, we can follow up and get even more motivated to actually achieve them. A PDP is for us a fun way of developing and reaching our personal as well as our professional goals, by the help of our colleagues.