A Strategic Planning Tool You Can Use for Personal Development

Organizations can use a SWOT Analysis to understand their internal and external environment as part of strategic planning activities. This understanding can be used to select strategies to achieve their mission and objectives.

SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. A SWOT analysis is a tool familiar to a lot of people and “can be used to size up an organization’s resource capabilities and deficiencies, market opportunities, and external threats” (Thompson et al., 2007:97)

Like many others, this tool prompts us to collect valuable information. What we do with that information gives this tried-and-true tool its power to help us in personal development.

Here is a quick summary of what you can do.

Identify goals.

We ultimately want to figure out how to achieve something, whether going back to college, increasing our quiet time, or getting more sleep.

The premise is that we collect key information and use that to determine what needs to be done so we can accomplish our goal.

The SWOT.

Next, we collect information for each segment of the analysis which in this case looks like the following: