Steering Your Career: How a Personal SWOT Analysis Puts You Back in Control

Emerging From The Festive Season Fog

We’re a few days into 2025 and I’m imagining that you’re either emerging from what I call the FSF…the Festive Season Fog. You know, it’s that time of year between Boxing Day and New Years Day where the days seem to be indeterminate. 

In Australia, it’s a cycle of wake-eat-relax-eat-sleep. We’re either away somewhere on annual leave or having a staycation and enjoying quieter environs because everyone else is away.

My family has been enjoying the latter. We defer our vacation until a week into January because it’s cheaper to rent holiday homes and our favourite holiday spot is slightly cheaper. 

What also accompanies this FSF is a plethora of social posts either recapping 2024 or encouraging us to set intentions ang goals for 2025. 

Rule #1...Be Kind To Yourself!

It can be either inspiring or demoralising to make goals and plans for the new year. I for one have an allergic response to toxic positivity, an abundance of woo-woo or tone-deaf posts that don’t recognise that mental health is a spectrum.

Mental wellbeing is something that I need to be vigilant about. I subscribe to the view that a big issue with the gene pool is there’s no attentive lifeguard. In my case, that means that I’ve inherited a mental disposition that I can’t give an inch or it takes a mile (and that mile leads down a road to depression).

My bouts of major and moderate depression are too innumerable to count. Suffice to say, they’ve been a constant companion through all stages of my life.

Why Should You Care About Goals At All?

Why do I share this with you? Because as a profession Admins are generally overworked, underpaid and undervalued. Three things that contribute to poor mental health.

What I also know is that many of you are reaching a point where you’d like to retire or at least step away from full time employment. 

At the other end of the spectrum are those of you that are weighing up if being an Admin is something you want to continue doing or if it’s time to step away and pursue a different career path. 

My message to you as you wrestle with these personal decisions and challenges is to remember that you are the captain of your own destiny. You can’t change your reality until you change your mind.

Stephen Covey says that “Effective people are guided by their own missions and manage their lives according to principles. Ineffective people follow other people’s agendas and manage their lives around others”.

A Practical & Tactical Approach for Executive Assistants

A Personal SWOT analysis is a key part to feeling this sense of purpose. It’s something I’ve explored both in my podcast (Episode #70 of Assist With Impact) and on my blog. Taking the time to do an analysis of your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats is a practical and tactical way to gain insight and understanding of where you are right now and where you could potentially go.

It’s an exercise that is always at the core of my coaching and mentoring and something I find informative and illuminating once you push through your resistance to it.

If you’re not familiar with the acronym SWOT, it’s a business tool that teams will do to evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats as they apply to a product or perhaps a service or a business. 

Why It’s A Good Use Of Time

Let’s talk about why doing this exercise is a good idea:

1. It’s a really good way of putting a stake in the ground and plotting where you are in terms of your strength, your weaknesses, the opportunities, and the threats that are relevant to you.

1. If you feel like you’re not in the drivers seat when it comes to your career this is a great activity to put you back in control. To take ownership of your career, what training and development you need and want and how your perceived in your role. 
2. It’s a jumping off point for setting those famous (or infamous) SMART goals. 
3. It helps you understand who you really are as a person. It’s a self-reflective exercise. You don’t have to share it with anyone, but in doing it you are going to get some insight. If you’re honest with yourself. It’s a really great way of reflecting, of spending some time reflecting personally and really understanding all of those aspects that are important, the strengths, the weaknesses, the opportunities and the threats.
4. You can use the output to  update your resume and LinkedIn profile. You’re going to gain clarity on your strengths that you can use to feed into these forms of communicating your personal brand.

In Summary

The bottom line is that it’s a holistic approach to developing yourself. It takes into account all aspects that are going to go towards you moving forward personally and professionally. It will also help you gain clarity on whether you’re an assistant for a reason, season or a lifetime (more on that in another issue).

I always undertake a SWOT analysis activity with anyone that I’m working with on a longer term coaching basis and I recommend it to all my clients.

This post is all about ‘Self Insight’ which is one of the five Impact and Insight zones that I focus on in my training, coaching, podcasting and speaking. 

Building your competence and confidence in each of these five zones is what enables you to spend more time showing up as a Linchpin Assistant. This is what you’re being when you are proactively driving outcomes and delivering results for the leader or leaders you support.

If you’d like to hear more, make sure to subscribe to AdminInsider to get a dose of Vitamin L (me!).

Warmest wishes, Liz

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