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SWOT analysis for your life

Recently Jim, a poster on here, posted a link for me to check out for the Success Manifesto about life planning. My article yesterday talked about making the “Resolution to Change” which is what I’ve been doing a fair amount of these days. When you are making the resolution to change things in your life it usually comes from analyzing certain aspects of life as they relate to you.

For those of you who aren’t sure what SWOT stands for it means…

· Strengths

· Weaknesses

· Opportunities

· Threats

When you can identify clearly your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats with a particular area of your life you can begin to plan and execute. This links back to my last article where I said and I paraphrase “Play to your strengths” and is similar to the 80/20 rule. This actually gives you some tools to give you a complete picture of areas that you need to work on, where you are strong, where the possibilities lay and what threatens the success of the plan.

At the Success Manifesto they’ve developed Life Plan example that allows you to see working examples of SWOT analysis done for things like growth, development, network and the list goes on. To be completely honest you can do a SWOT analysis on anything pretty much. In the end it’s just a critical thinking tool or a “life tool” if you will. If you are feeling a little bit lost in running your business or in life in general sit down with a piece of paper (that stuff that still grows on trees) and plot out your current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Strengths will be the hardest for some to get down on paper and easier for others it just depends on how much you like yourself and that’s really the way it should be for most people. Think about it; are you really and truly great at a lot of things? Probably not, but are there a few things that you are exceptional at? Most definitely and if you don’t know that’s a good place to start your journey.

Weaknesses come next and for most people you can think of at least a few things you are weak on. Myself, I am a terrible runner and I cannot run to save my life but I wish that I can run well so now I am using an elliptical machine to train and learn the basics of running. I get really bored of programming from time to time and for me it’s more of a hobby that I enjoy doing for this site. You’ll have a list of things that you’d like to do better and those are your weaknesses. It’s perfectly okay to be weak in something.

Opportunities really are all around us. From looking at strengths and weaknesses we can then start to pick out the opportunities that seem to evade us most of the time. In learning to really know who you are the opportunities of life reveal themselves over time. In other words, it probably won’t happen as you read this article but it will happen as you put more effort into finding yourself and as you find yourself the opportunities will come to light.

Threats are basically the reality that you face with respect to what it is that you want to do from having thought through the other steps. I personally think of this step as “Reality” because this is essence when you put the daydreams away and focus on things that affect you or your business or your life.

If you’ve ever needed a little perspective doing a SWOT analysis regardless of the topic you need help looking at will give you a little more insight into what is going on and as you’ll see you can apply it to anything.

Luc

Fellow SWOTer