Create a Personal Manifesto for Personal Growth and Professional Development

A manifesto is a series of statements clarifying what you stand for in your life as well as what you won’t stand for.

Having a personal manifesto helps keep your focus on who you are and your purpose in life. I created my personal manifesto as a certificate with a personalized logo and it’s up on the wall in front of my desk.

You may be wondering why it’s so important for women in business to have some kind of measuring stick, such as a personal manifesto, to use in your decision making process for personal growth and professional development. At a conference I met a man who was extremely successful at predicting the futures market, which is a part of the stock market.

He felt he was really successful in just about every area of his life except for his weight. He was extremely overweight. He had gone to see his mentor in person, and they had a conversation where his mentor asked him, “What are your rules about your weight?”

He thought about it, and he realized, “Okay. I’ve been so successful at my work because I have clear-cut rules on how I do everything in my business.”

He also quickly realized that he had never set up any personal development rules about what his health was supposed to look like. He had a vision and an action plan in every other area of his life, and, surprise, the one area of his life that wasn’t working was his health and his weight.

So he went home from that meeting and spent several hours writing out what he wanted his health to look like; much like a personal health manifesto.

He decided he was going to lose 70 pounds in 70 weeks, without starving himself or being on a diet. Then he planned to make millions by telling other people how to do it.

This is only possible because he established a plan, an outline of what health looked like to him, and what he would and wouldn’t have in his life pertaining to his health.

That’s what your personal manifesto is. It’s the rules you’ve set for yourself to be who you are. It is an easy reference for women in business. When something comes up and you aren’t sure what to do, you can look at your personal manifesto and see if it fits with what you wrote. It won’t be long before you don’t have to look at your manifesto at all. It will become a natural part of your internal decision making process for personal growth and professional development.

One multi-millionaire friend of mine mentioned she was setting up a new real estate investing partnership. She talked about the rules they set for how they were going to find properties, who the partnership would acquire them with, and how they would sell them.

Everything you want to be successful at needs a set of rules or guidelines that you follow so you have a way to determine your level of success and a way to judge opportunities as being a good fit or not for personal growth and professional development.

You don’t have to call it rules. If you have a problem with the word rules, which most women in business do, you can use guidelines, blueprint, roadmap, or whatever you want to call it.

Creating a personal manifesto is the first step in deciding what’s most important to you.