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!
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.
*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.
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!
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.
When you conduct a SWOT analysis for your day-to-day life, you’re basically asking these questions:
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!
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?)
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:
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!!
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:
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.
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:
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:
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!
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.
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:
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.
Cortney is a Christian life coach and recovering over-achiever who is passionate about helping Christian women embrace who God created them to be so they can confidently step into any season of life with passion, purpose, and peace. She’s also an ENFJ, MBTI® coach, M. Ed in College Student Development, Pilates and Yoga teacher, wife, mama, and entrepreneur. In her pre-kid life, she coordinated programs for, coached, funded, and provided leadership training for more than 60+ student organizations and 100s of university students for 7+ years. (Helping people highlight their inner awesomeness and reach their goals is her jam!)
More importantly, she’s God’s beloved.
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