Personal SWOT Analysis Examples

What is the biggest reason for success? It is the motivation to pursue life goals. You need to channel your energies in the right direction. However, how would you assess if you are giving the right effort in the right direction? Here we shall discuss a very simple tool used by managers. Personal SWOT Analysis Examples will help you do that. SWOT analysis can be done quickly and it can help you assess your personal situation. This can help you apply efforts in the right direction.

What is SWOT analysis?

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. These are the four aspects of your life. We shall briefly describe each one of them to give an overview. If you are already aware of how to do SWOT analysis then you can skip to the next section:

Strengths: these are the areas where you are stronger. You are skilled or trained or have a natural instinct to excel in the areas of your strengths.
Weaknesses: Areas where you are weaker than others. These are the areas where you have a disadvantage over others. You need to improve upon these areas to excel.
Opportunities: The possible areas where you can leverage something to your advantage.
Threats: these are the vulnerabilities that can stop you from being successful in your endeavor.

We want to go step by step when we do a personal SWOT analysis. Firstly, we should identify personal goals. You can refer to our article on personal goal setting to learn how to set personal goals.

Goals can be of two types:

1. Short term goals
2. Long term goals

Defining a goal as a long term goal is your call. However, goals that are longer than a year can be considered a long term goal. Once you have your goals in place, you can think of SWOT analysis as a planning tool for your goals.

Personal SWOT Analysis Examples

Personal SWOT can be more powerful than a professional one. Firstly, you can be more critical without the fear of criticism. Secondly, you are typically true to yourself compared to others as there is no agency cost. However, you need to look at some aspects more deeply. Let us break a myth about strengths and weaknesses before we discuss personal SWOT analysis examples.

People assume that positivity is the key to success. While optimism is good, it is not enough.

Build upon strengths, and weaknesses will gradually take care of themselves

Joyce C. Lock

On one hand the quote presented above seems perfect. However, on the other hand, there is small problem. Many weaknesses don’t go away on their own. You need to actively look for them, identify them and work hard towards overcoming them.

You can simply draw four quadrants on a piece of paper. Label each one of them as S, W, O and T. Once you are done with that you can start populating the list under each heading(quadrant). You can also use the template provided in the next section.

Strengths

Strengths are the first things you should start SWOT analysis. Here are some questions you can ask yourself to come up with a list of your strengths:

1. What skills do you have that can help you with the goal you have set?
2. What resources do you have that can help you achieve your goals?

Weaknesses

The second aspect of SWOT analysis is the weakness. It is important to sincrely enlist your weaknesses. You can even take help of a friend to highlight your weakness. However, we are talking about personal weakness. It is contextual. It solely depends on your goals.

1. What skills do you lack to accomplish your goal?
2. What are the personal problems(procastination, lack of perseverence,etc) that can prevent you from acieving your goal?

Opportunities

Similar to professional SWOT analysis, the opportunities are external factors. Opportunities are those things that can help you with your goals if you capitalize on them. Here are some ways in which you can discover them:

1. What are the external factors that can help you with your goal? For example, if there is a drop in the price of cameras, it can help you start your Youtube channel.
2. Is there an opportunity that can help you fulfill part of your goal faster?
   For example, if your goal is to save for retirement, you can see an unexpected bonus as an opportunity to boost your savings that year.
3. Is there someone who can help you get to your goal faster or easier?
   Opportunities can also be in the form of people.

Threats

This one is easily missed if we never did the SWOT analysis. Spend some time to figure out the biggest(and smallest) things that can derail your plan.

1. Who can stop you from achieving your goals?
   People who can create roadblocks or deviate you from your pursuit.
2. Major shifts that can make your goal or you irrelevant.
   If your personal goal is to become a customer care representative, it can be potentially threatened by the use of automation and AI.

Personal SWOT analysis template

Now, let us consider an example. Let us say, your personal goal is to become a data scientist. You want to do a SWOT analysis for this goal.

You can use our FREE personal SWOT analysis template. However, you must remember to follow the process. We have discussed it in detail in earlier sections.

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