 How do we know what to work on in our lifelong study of leadership? Today, we'll help you create the roadmap. Welcome back and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. We're focusing on development, education, and September here at Evil Genius Leadership because we believe great leadership is a discipline that requires lifelong study and self-reflection. There are so many ideas and concepts to explore in leadership and figuring out what to learn about next can be overwhelming. Today, we're going to help you build the outline of a leadership development plan that can be like your roadmap that guides you through the most important topics to help you become the leader you want to be. The leadership development plan is something you put together yourself that highlights the kind of leader you want to be, assesses how you're doing reaching that goal, and documents concrete action steps you're going to take to get there. To build our plans, we're going to be drawing on some of the work we've done in other videos, so if you'd like to check out the videos on core values, leadership traits, leadership skills, and setting goals, feel free to go back and watch them before you continue with this video. So let's get our plan started by getting an idea of what our goals are. Take your goals, whatever they are, and break them down into near, mid, and long-term goals. I like to use the time frame of right now to two years from now as the short term, two to five years as the mid term, and five to ten years as the long term, but you can choose whatever time frame suit you best. As examples, you may pick getting a job at a company you've always wanted to work at as a short term goal, become a manager or executive at that company as a mid term goal, and start in your own business in that same field as a long term goal. Make sure to include personal goals in this plan as well. Even though we're calling it a leadership development plan, it'll certainly help get your life organized as a whole if you include any goals you have about family, community, or even great life experiences you want to have in your plan. Now that we've got our goals defined, we have to take a hard look at the traits and skills we'll need to have to make those goals a reality. If you've already got your list of key leadership traits and skills completed from a previous exercise, go ahead and start plugging those in under the goals you feel they're important to achieving. In our example of starting a business in five to ten years, let's say we need some traits like creativity, dedication, and inspiring others, and some skills like sales, marketing, and some basic accounting to run the business. Now, some of these skills may also be really beneficial to us in our mid term goal of becoming a manager, so let's include them under that goal as well. Fill in the traits and skills you feel you need to achieve every goal in all three of your categories. Now comes the really tough part, doing some honest self assessment about how good we are at the traits and skills we feel like we need to have to achieve our goals. Sometimes we're too hard or soften ourselves when it comes to these kinds of assessments, so if you feel like you're having a hard time objectively assessing the areas you're really great in and the areas you could use some work in, ask a friend or trusted colleague to give you their opinion. Once you have a really good idea of the traits and skills you need to work on or want to work on, sometimes we're pretty good at something but feel like it'd be beneficial to really become an expert at it, now we need to write down some concrete action steps we can take to build those traits and skills and map out when we need to complete those steps by. Going back to our example, if we feel like we need to be able to inspire others before we get that management position in a couple years and that being better public speaker would help with that, what steps can we take to become a better public speaker in the next two years? Can we take a class, attend a training program or join a group like Toastmasters to help us with that? Keep adding these specific action steps to your plan for every area you feel like you want or need to work on. Don't forget to include the dates that you want to complete these steps by. Now you should have a few pages worth of well defined actions you can take that will build on each other to get you all the skills and experience you need to achieve your goals and become the kind of leader you want to be. And like I said before, treat this leadership development plan as a roadmap and not a strict list of things to do in an exact order. If you're interested in learning one of the skills in your plan a little earlier than you had mapped out, go ahead and do it. Just like you can choose to go to your destinations on your trip in a different order than you planned, you can skip around within your plan if it makes the most sense to you. Also, don't be afraid to take a detour off your original roadmap if an interesting or intriguing opportunity to get some unique experience comes up and it's going to make you a better leader. Add that destination to your roadmap and broaden your horizons. If you found this helpful, please share it with a friend or co-worker. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and click off on that globe to the right. That'll get you subscribed to our email list and that'll bring all of our content direct to your inbox. If you have any leadership or business questions you'd like us to answer, reach out to us on social media or email us at info at evilgeniusleadership.com. Thanks for watching. I really appreciate it and remember, the future is out there. Lead the way.