Situational Assessment

As I said earlier in my last post, to be truly successful in life, you need to determine where you are coming from, who you want to be, the means through which you will get there and then begin to take those actions that would guarantee success.
In determining these, you will need to sit down and do a situational assessment of your life. So let us proceed to examine the aforementioned issues.

Where you are coming from

There is a popular saying that if you do not know where you are coming from how will you know where you are going to. So you need to assess where you are coming from. In life, you must have a starting point. Your starting point is who you are right now, where you are right now and what you have right now.

Your past also matters but you will agree with me that your past contributed to your present situation. So when I refer to your starting point as your present state your past is already included in it.

You will need to do a complete analysis of your current situation. You will consider your strength, your weaknesses, opportunities available to you and the threats you face. This analysis is actually known as SWOT. You will need to do this exercise in every area of your life; your work/business, your skills, your relationship, your finances, your spirituality and so on. An important analysis that will complete the exercise is to find out how you got to where you are right now. You must look at your successes and failures as this will help you in determining how to get to the future.

At the conclusion of this exercise, you will be in a position to truly determine who you are and where you are coming from and whether you are ready to take any action that would guarantee you success. However, I wish to say that no matter your realization after this exercise, you need to take positive action towards achieving your goals of becoming successful.


Who you want to be

Without knowing where you are coming from or who you presently are, you wouldn’t know who you want to be or where you want to go. As George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” Knowing who you are at the moment is important as it would enable you have a clearer idea of who you eventually want to be. You would also begin to know the things you need to change in your life so as to become who you want to be and also the things you need to add on. If you do not know yourself well enough, you won’t be able to clearly see who you want to be. Who you want to be should be all encompassing covering your emotional, spiritual, physical and intellectual life.

So the current state analysis which you carried out is a very necessary exercise in your road to success.
What do you want to be in the future? What are your dreams and desires for your life? How will you want your life to look like in 2, 5, 10 and many years to come? What picture do you have of your family, your finances, your work/business, your spirituality, your position in the society etc? Create a perfect vision of what you will look like if you were successful in every respect.

This aspect of situational analysis helps you to picture your future and see what you will be like then. If you seriously do this aspect there is a kind of feeling you get- a feeling of hope and possibility.

Now the next thing to do is to determine what you need to do to achieve this picture you have about your future.

How to get there

You have already looked at your past, analysed your current status and pictured your future. The next step is to find out how to get from where you are now to that beautiful future you dreamed of.

You should ask yourself very pressing questions. What do you do now, to get from where you are to where you want to be? Based on your experience, what should you be doing more of or less of? What should you start doing that you are not doing today? What should you stop doing altogether? What behaviour should you stop doing and what behaviour should you imbibe? What are the things in your life that you should change? What influence you positively that you must do more of? Etc.

By the time you have asked yourself these questions and more, you will then draw a step-by-step plan on how to get yourself to that future you have created in advance in your mind.

Goodnews

If you can ask and answer all these questions accurately, the strategic plan or blueprint comes together more easily than if we were trying to plan without being clear about where we were or how we go there.

Taking the time to honestly evaluate each part of your situation before you launch towards your goal will save you months and even years on your journey.

Let me assure you that whatever picture you have of your future is achievable. Napoleon Hill said, “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe it can achieve.” Do I need to say a word more? Ok, consider the achievement of Barack Obama.

We will be discussing goals in the next post. Do keep a date with us.


Written by Gabriel Gambo Nmadu.

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Gabriel Gambo Nmadu is committed to helping you achieve success in your life and business. You can mail him on gabu4u1@gmail.com for advice or help in your your business, relationship or life generally.