personal SWOT analysis: Strengths

Continuing with the Personal SWOT analsys from my previous post:

I didn’t do a personal SWOT analysis before I decided to retire from the Army and come to UNH. But if I had, I think it would have supported the decision. I did do the analysis recently to help me think through what post-tenure will look like. When organizations go through a strategic planning process, an important part of the exercise is to get focused on what is important, and to set aside the things the organization is not going to try to do. One of my Read recommendations this week is for a Gail Golden’s book, Curating Your Life. More below - but one of her key points is you have to make hard choices about what matters and what you can accept being bad at. A personal SWOT analysis can help you with that.

If you don’t want to take time to do all five parts now, I’d suggest meditating on the Strengths portion. I thought I’d take a few words this week and talk about that part. I really like the question, “What do you keep coming back to?” Even as a college-aged person, I think I could have seen some of the patterns emerging in my life, and I suspect you can, too. Helpful here is to try the Sparketype personality test I talked about back in RWL #248. Were you someone who played competitive sports and thrived on pushing yourself and being part of a team? Maybe you played an instrument and thrived on pursuing perfection through repetition and practice? For me, I think it was a need to create experiences and connections for people, and through that, help people be successful. I really loved (and obviously still love) exploring ideas and sharing them with people. I can look back to when I was a kid in junior high, and I became obsessed with D&D and other role playing games (Stranger Things is my childhood, less the monsters). I most often enjoyed being the Dungeon Master - the person who created the world and facilitated the story that the other participants engaged in. There were books of rules you had to study and learn in order to play and I loved the research process, but also the endless possibilities. A great gaming session was when everyone felt they had been challenged and maybe grown a little. Fast forward 20 years, as a comptroller and chief financial officer, I was obsessed with rules and possibilities, and trying to figure out what was important. That’s pretty common with finance-types, but what made me effective was my desire to create connection - I spent a lot of time listening to the people in the operational departments and helping them to be successful. While I was working as a CFO, I also ran a leadership book club, and I taught classes on how to use Excel and Access to do analytical work to anyone in the organization who wanted to learn it. Fast forward another 10 years and I was teaching. 

Looking back, it sounds inevitable. I think I’m good at analyzing complicated things and explaining them to others. I think I’m pretty good at making that process interesting. A big part of why I’m good at teaching is because I care about people’s success and I work hard to connect with students. Students can tell that about a teacher pretty quickly, and I think it helps them learn. But there were other ways I could have used my strengths, and if other opportunities had presented themselves, I might not have become a teacher. 

I have heard it said that we have the causality between passion and success reversed. Most of the time we are told to pursue our passion, and success will follow. But in fact, success tends to breed passion. Success creates a dopamine hit for our brain - and we naturally want more of it. If you play to your strengths, you are more likely to have success. And repeated success tends to develop into a passion. We tend to come back to activities we were successful at, which is why the question, “What do you keep coming back to?” is useful for identifying your strengths. You probably already know what they are.