The personal development is a serious task. Therefore it requires a serious approach. In order to do effective personal development, it is necessary respect the logical sequence of steps. First, it is necessary to assess your personal qualities at the current level. Your current development level will dictate the following step. Personal development plan that contains concrete actions and time frame and goals is the next step. Finally, developments should be tracked, recorded and assessed.

But first let\’s start with the first step — the assessment. The self assessment should be done in a multidimensional way. This means that you need to assess yourself from perspective of yourself and from perspective of the others. You need to assess your self from different time perspectives.

When assessing your self you need to ask yourself a series of various questions. Who you are and what you are? What do you have and what do you still need? What do you think that others think about you? What are your strengths and what are your opportunities in life? What will you need to obtain for the future? These are only examples of what types of questions need to be answered in order to have assessment of personal development needs. Assessment from different angles can help you to map your PD needs in more accurate manner.

Next step of assessment is to place all these questions in different time perspective. All previous questions are referring to the current situation with your personal attributes. Now you need to place all these questions in context of view from different point in time.

One approach is to assess your today\’s attributes from future perspective. Answers on these questions can give you tips about how good you really are. Usually we are not aware of our gaps at this moment, but we are clearly able to observe our gaps that we have 10 years ago. But this is 10 years too late! Why wouldn\’t you