SWOT Analysis (Part 2) - Your Weaknesses

A SWOT analysis is a great tool to help you uncover your strengths and weaknesses as well as opportunities and threats just around the corner. It’s a strategic tool that will help you in both your business and personal life. In a business context, it helps you choose a niche market and differentiate yourself based on your strengths. In a personal context, it helps you clarify what direction you should take your business and how best to utilize your talents and abilities to take advantage of opportunities.

In my last article, I discussed how you can uncover your strengths. In this article, I’m going to focus on evaluating your weaknesses.

Evaluate Your Weaknesses
In his book, Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham says in a Gallup Poll, when people were asked “Which will help you achieve greater success: Building your strengths or fixing your weaknesses?” 59% of people thought fixing your weaknesses was the way to go. However, in a study of 198,000 employees, those that utilized their strengths every day were more satisfied with their jobs. While it will always be your strengths that set you apart from your competitors, it’s important to uncover your weaknesses and manage them effectively.

For the next 10 minutes, take out a blank sheet of paper and list areas where you think you could use improvement or may get stuck. Here are some questions to ask:

• What could you improve about yourself?
• Do you lack confidence? (ie public speaking or giving presentations scares you)
• Do you feel you need more training in certain areas?
• Do you fear failure so you don’t try as hard?
• Could you be more organized?
• Do you procrastinate?
• Do you never feel you have enough time to get things done?
• Do you hate to be challenged or often feel personally attacked?
• Can you take constructive criticism as a learning tool?
• Do you feel powerless or don’t know what to say in certain situations?

In addition to positive core beliefs, we often hold negative core beliefs that can hold us back or limit our success. Many times, we don’t even realize we have these beliefs until we hit a brick wall and become aware of our problems. If you already know that you hold negative core beliefs or have certain fears, write them down.

For instance, every business owner will experience rejection or dissatisfaction at some point. There will always be causes where your prospect goes with someone else or your client points out something about you that he/she doesn’t like or agree with. Don’t take it as a personal attack. Some times personalities just don’t click. Other times, you may have to say “he/she is right” and learn from the experience.

Managing Your Weaknesses
Buckingham writes that “For many of us, our fear of weaknesses seems to overshadow our confidence in our strengths.” Here are five tips he offers to manage your weaknesses:

1. Get a little better at it. In some areas, all it takes is a bit of training to pull you up a notch. If you’re not good at accounting but need to understand business finance, take a course.
2. Design a support system. If you’re bad at something, come up with rituals that remind you to focus on your weaknesses from time to time. For instance, if you’re not a very organized person, decide to set aside time each week to clean out your inbox.
3. Use your strengths to overpower your weaknesses. Sometimes you can dig into your desire to do something to help overcome your weaknesses. For instance, your desire to help and empathize with people can help you get out of your comfort zone and volunteer at a local charity or speak at a local event.
4. Find a partner. If you’re not good at something, find someone who is and have them do it.
5. Stop doing it. This is often a last resort, but if you’re really bad at something, stop doing it for a week and see what happens. Obviously, this doesn’t work all the time. If you’re disorganized, you can’t just stop cleaning. If you’re bad at interacting with clients, you can’t just stop interacting with them. But if try to pick up a new skill set and find that it just isn’t working for you, stop doing it and try something else.