What’s Personal SWOT?

Originally published on MoriceMabry.com on July 22, 2015 By Morice Mabry.

What’s personal SWOT? Personal SWOT analysis is an internal inventory of your strengths and weaknesses, and external opportunities and threats to maximize and minimize. In other words, you’re looking within to gauge where you stand now and looking outwards at advantages and risks.
Strengths: What are you great at? If you can’t think of any strength, think of what people compliment you about the most. Think about personality traits, service, family, work, school, courses, industries, tasks, talents, etc.
Weaknesses: What are your challenged areas? Since, we live in such a negative society, it may be easier to identify our weakness because we are often taught to correct our weakness instead of sharpening our strengths.
Opportunities: I want you to think what opportunities exist for you right now. In your field, where are your competitors lacking at and how can you take advantage of that to make it a benefit for you? A competitor’s weakness can be your opportunity especially if it’s your strength. Project out the timing and outcomes involved that may lead to opportunities. This is the time to maximize on your potential.
Threats: A competitor’s strength can be a threat to you. There are also circumstances that are out of your control and may limit you from achieving your fullest. Threats can also present itself in environmental forms like politics, law, technology, culture, and society. For example, a sales tax increase may affect the spending trends of certain cultures and may be a threat to you because you may market to this particular group and their spending habits are now trending downward.
In all, there is definitely a lot to think about here. That’s exactly why it’s called a personal SWOT analysis. I guarantee if you put the time into this, it will be well worth it and you will have a better analysis of yourself, business and industry. I would be happy to assist you in developing one. Reach out and see how I may help. Otherwise, once your personal SWOT analysis is established it’ll be time to start setting SMART Goals.
Morice Mabry is owner of MasterMinding Forward, an Adjunct Business Professor, Masterminding Group Facilitator, and Motivational Coach. His passion is servicing disoriented small business owners, entrepreneurs, and college students who struggle with business and life planning, accountability, sustaining vision, and goal setting.
You can visit Morice at http://moricemabry.com