Turning a situation into your favor

One of the things that make life challenging is difficulties. Although they are part of our daily lives, we spend more time trying to avoid them than trying to reflect on them, which would allow us to get more out of them.

Leading an easy life without any type of challenges will make us lazy and well-off. Instead, difficulties sharpen our ingenuity, help us bring out the most creative side of ourselves. This desire to improve makes us grow as people and makes us approach life more optimistically.

Once this lesson is completed and approved, learners will be able to:

1. Use the SWOT analysis in a personal way.
2. Get tips for turning a situation in your favour.

 SWOT Analysis: identifying our reality.

First, you will have to identify the threats or difficulties you have in any of the areas in which you move as a person (family, friends, work ...).

One of the tools which you can use is the SWOT Analysis which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. In principle, it is used for building a start-up or guiding an existing company, but you can also use it in other aspects of your life.

The SWOT Analysis used in a personal way could help us to evaluate our situation to set our goals and think about how to change the necessary things to achieve our objectives in the future.

The SWOT analysis evaluates four factors:

• Weaknesses
• Threats
• Strengths
• Opportunities

Two of these factors, strengths and weaknesses, allow us to evaluate the inner plane, that which depends solely and exclusively on you, and the other two factors, opportunities and threats, will facilitate the analysis of the external plane, the environment in which you find yourself.

The utility of SWOT analysis, both at a business and personal level, is always the same: it is a form of self-assessment of both us and the circumstances of our environment.

Having defined your weaknesses, threats, strengths, and opportunities, it's time to ask ourselves: how can we turn a threat into an opportunity?

Turning things into our favor:

Legend has it that a newly married couple decided to go to a cabin for their honeymoon, to enjoy the peace and tranquillity of a mountain landscape. Unfortunately, the tranquillity of the place was interrupted by a deafening noise, apparently that of a bird.

The husband went out several times to try to chase the bird away, but it turned out that it was quite a hard-headed woodpecker and did not want to stop chopping the wood. They chased it away and then it perched on the roof again. Instead of leaving, the couple decided to "adopt" the bird and named him.

It turned out that the newlywed young man was a cartoon writer. He decided to create a series about the Mad Bird and presented it to some Hollywood studios. Once his proposal was approved, Walter Lantz worked hard to create the character who later, for more than sixty years, was one of the studio's main stars and entertained millions of viewers young and old. Do you remember?

How many times does it happen to us that we want to eliminate what bothers us in life, and it turns out that it can be an opportunity?

To know how to see the good side of threats or difficulties, you can try to approach things with this attitude:

• Be optimistic:

Trying to look at difficulties positively will keep you motivated to seek a solution, or to try to see the opportunity that this threat or difficulty may generate for you.

• Stop complaining and start looking for solutions:

Complaints don’t solve anything, also, it makes the people around you lose motivation. Lack of action is what causes difficulties to remain.

• Be responsible:

Don’t blame others for difficulties, only if it is necessary to make someone else take responsibility. Look at yourself, you are the first responsible for the situation to change.

• Don’t leave for tomorrow what you can do today:

Only committed people are those who can take control of their lives and putting themselves before any difficulty. Procrastination is the enemy of progress

• Take risks:

If you are a person who doubts a lot, start by taking small risks, that is, small decisions where if you make a mistake the consequences will not be very big. If you are unable to decide, you will be a slave to the decisions of others and you will be carried away by the circumstances around you.

Conclusion

Although there are indeed certain difficulties that it is not in our power to change, it is up to us to see the positive side and take advantage of these threats to grow as people, thus achieving turning things into our favor.

Bibliography

8 ways to shift the universe in your favor today

Cómo hacer un análisis DAFO personal y profesional.

Here you have the contents of the lesson in PDF: