How you can live with passion and purpose by understanding your personality

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You want to find your purpose. You want to live a life of passion. You want MORE out of your life.

But how the heck do you do it??

I suggest you start with who you are. What’s your personality? Strengths? Weaknesses? Opportunities to be more purposeful and passionate? Threats to doing just that?

Understanding and embracing your personality can help you live with passion and purpose. You can more easily leverage your strengths, accommodate for your limitations, maximize opportunities, and tune into threats.

Friend, you are called to live an intentional life with passion and purpose as God’s beloved.

In this post, I’ll share how understanding your personality can help you live with passion and purpose by leveraging the SLOT method.

Let’s dive in!

How do you define personality?

According to dictionary.com:

Personality – the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual’s distinctive character.

Dictonary.com

Your personality can also be called your nature, disposition, temperament, persona, psyche or identity.

It’s a modge podge of different qualities that make up YOU.

Taking a personality test* helps you self-reflect

*Note: Personality tests are actually personality assessments. Why should you care about this? In an assessment, you’re assessing where you fall across a spectrum of behaviors. You can pass or fail a test. You can’t fail a personality assessment!

When you take a personality assessment, you’re given an opportunity to self-reflect through a series of questions.

If you’re like me, you want to go through the answers as quickly as possible to get to the results.

Even when you’re attempting to hustle through the questions, it still forces you to consider how you tend to react in different situations.

• Do you respond like X or Y?
• Do you tend to gravitate toward options A or B?
• … and so forth.

While getting to the good stuff (i.e. your personality results), you’re getting an opportunity to self-reflect on how you do life… which leads to creating your own SLOT analysis and can help you live with more passion and purpose!

Introducing the SLOT team – here to help you live with passion and purpose

In the 1960s, Albert Humphrey, a management consultant at the Stanford Research Institute, developed the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis to help improve corporate planning. (More about that here.) It’s been actively used by individuals and corporations ever since to determine their strengths, limitations or weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

But… why should YOU care about this?

After all, you’re not a corporation. You’re a human being who simply wants to live intentionally with passion and purpose as God’s beloved, right?

How could a business analysis tool help you live more intentionally?

Well, let’s dig into what a SWOT analysis actually involves.

What does a SWOT analysis involve?

When you conduct a SWOT analysis for your day-to-day life, you’re basically asking these questions:

• What are my strengths? What am I doing well? What sets me apart? What are my good qualities? What are some of my personal passions? What fills me with purpose?
• What are my weaknesses? Where do I need to improve? What are some of my pain points? What do others do better than me? Where do I need help?
• What are my opportunities? What are my goals? What are some ways I can grow? What are activities, relationships or other pursuits where I can maximize my strengths?
• What are my threats? What are my challenges? What are some obstacles to me pursuing a life of purpose and passion? What tends to stop me in my tracks?

Did you notice that a lot of these type of questions come up in the personality quizzes, tests and assessments you’ve taken?

Exactly.

While your particular personality results may not explicitly use the SWOT terms, you can use this framework to get practical with how you’re spending your time and energy.

After all, when you understand your strengths and opportunities, you can better pinpoint what brings you passion and gives you purpose.

And understanding your weaknesses and threats can help you better recognize, avoid or respond to pain points – and start giving yourself more grace for being human!

So, let’s put this idea into action with an actual personality type!

Example for this post: MBTI® Type ENFJ ( Extraverted Intuitive Feeling Judging)

For this post, I’ll use my own personality type as a model for our SWOT analysis, so you can see how you could apply this to your type!

(And if anyone is going to feel uncomfortable putting their weaknesses out there, it ought to be the teacher, right?)

What are your strengths?

Oh boy, this part is SO fun! Personality assessments can often articulate strengths you didn’t realize you had or better clarify ones you know you have.

For our ENFJ, a few strengths include:

• Adept at promoting harmony and morale
• Love writing, talking, and telling stories
• Known for their powers of persuasion
• Teaching and mentoring come easily to them
• Have a passion for helping others fulfill their potential
• More strengths found here.

Whatever your type is, you may be surprised to learn that what comes naturally to you is not so natural for someone else. Say what?!

For instance, when I first dug into the MBTI® assessment results, I was floored. I thought everyone LOVED teaching, mentoring, personal growth… everything on my results.

But… that’s not true. What I thought was totally the norm was actually something unique I have to offer. How empowering!!

What are your weaknesses?

Of course, that also means we each have weaknesses that come with those super amazing strengths.

A few examples of potential weaknesses for our ENFJ are:

• May dive head first into something before considering necessary and important details
• Tend to overcommit from enthusiasm of wanting to pursue many opportunities at once
• Can struggle to make decisions that don’t have a human element
• Tend to prioritize others’ needs before their own, thus can struggle with expressing their own needs
• More weaknesses found here.

Ack! I don’t like this about myself!!

If you don’t like admitting where you’re weak, you’re not alone.

It’s all too easy to feel like you’re broken when looking at lists of weaknesses.

But that’s not true.

For instance, does admitting that you aren’t skilled in building bookcases make you a less effective parent? Um – no.

The same goes with personality – not being excellent in one area doesn’t mean you are less of a person. It does mean you’re human – congratulations!

As an ENFJ, I’ve struggled SO HARD with overcommitting myself. Sometimes it was because I felt obligated to do certain activities. Most of the time, though, it was because most of my commitments were wonderful, exciting, worthy causes. How the heck do you filter that??

Understanding more of my “why” helped me better understand how to navigate this particular weakness. (More about that in the Threats section!)

Now that we’ve got a good grasp of our strengths and weaknesses, let’s dig into our opportunities.

What are your opportunities?

In most personality assessment results, you’ll see something like “Your Type: Growth and Development.”

For the purposes of this post, we’ll treat those sections as “opportunities” – ways to flourish and challenge yourself.

For our ENFJ, some opportunities for growth include:

• Giving yourself permission to think about ideas, projects or activities before pursuing it so you can consider the details, objectives and time commitments before acting on it.
• Break projects into smaller chunks so it’s more achievable and has a distinct goal.
• Allow yourself to intentionally confront and deal with conflict – this may even improve your relationships!
• You tend to be very future-oriented, so use your scheduling and planning skills to practice completing tasks today so you can achieve your future goals.
• More opportunities found here.

What are your threats?

Finally, the last part of your personality test SWOT analysis includes determining what are your threats.

In this case, let’s think about threats to your pursuit of living intentionally with passion and purpose as God’s beloved.

For our ENFJ example, some of the threats they could face are:

• Overcommitting themselves
• Avoiding relationship conflicts
• Disregarding important details that affect bigger projects, etc.
• Getting so caught up in the future that they forget to be present in the future
• … and so forth.

I rather like to think of personality threats as obstacles or pain points.

Obstacles or pain points can be addressed or overcome.

Sometimes it means you need to ask for help.

At other times, it may mean communicating boundaries.

… and so forth.

Acknowledging what your threats are can empower you to move forward more confidently and competently – with better days ahead. Win!

Need a kickstart embracing your potential?

Grab the FREE Embrace Your Potential Playbook to learn more about your God-given personality and get some practical tips to start living intentionally TODAY with passion and purpose as God’s beloved.

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Wrapping up how you can live with passion and purpose by understanding your personality

When you understand your personality – including your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats – you can live with passion and purpose.

Why?

When you know the answers to these questions:

• What are your strengths?
• What are your weaknesses?
• What are your opportunities?
• What are your threats?

You can more easily leverage your strengths, accommodate for your weaknesses, maximize opportunities, and tune into threats.

All of that helps YOU live with passion and purpose – simply by understanding your personality.

Talk about a huge win!!

You can begin your journey to a more purposeful, passionate, and intentional life by taking a personality assessment. If you have already taken one, I encourage you to revisit your results using the SWOT analysis. It’s simple and yet so empowering!

P.S. Want some crazy simple steps to start living intentionally? Grab the Embrace Your Potential Playbook. It’ll help you zoom in on your God-gifted personality and give you practical tips to be more intentional, passionate, and purposeful as God’s beloved so you can become the best version of yourself.