In my late thirties, I experienced a stress-related nervous breakdown caused by the pressures of work. I was a management trainer by profession but I had found myself in the wrong job. A fish out of water. When I tip-toed back into the workplace after a significant period of absence, I decided, somewhat ironically, to turn back to the corporate world for help.
I drafted a business plan for myself!
I reckoned that something tried and tested in the professional arena could be conveniently adapted for personal use. I couldn’t afford to get things wrong again, so my natural inclination was to find a structured way of getting things right this time around.
What I produced was a watered-down version of a genuine business plan, holistic in nature, taking into account both my personal and professional life. I was beginning to realize that stress management and work/life balance were closely connected concepts.
So here it is, step by step. Four steps in total.
Step 1 – Conducting a SWOT analysis
The SWOT is probably the single most utilized tool in the professional world. It is used to identify the strengths and weaknesses of a brand or business, and the opportunities and threats they are facing. The first two are internal factors and the second two are external. Once you have completed the SWOT, this can then be used as a springboard to help you select your strategic priorities, giving you a clear sense of direction.
In short, the SWOT pinpoints where you are at and helps you decide where to go next.
You can apply the same principles to more or less anything, including your own personal and professional life. Here was how I used it to audit my situation after I emerged from my breakdown:
Step 2 – Setting yourself strategic priorities
The first role of the SWOT is to itemize the most relevant strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities, but its second crucial job is to then do something with this information. In other words, you have to make the SWOT “sweat”.
- Which strengths will you leverage?
- Which weaknesses will you fix?
- Which opportunities will you look to pursue?
- Which threats do you need to address?
Each of those four questions demand that you do something tangible with the information you have gathered. By combining, connecting and colliding elements from each of the four boxes, you can formulate a number of strategic priorities that will provide you with direction and destination.
This is how I made my SWOT “sweat”:
Step 3 – Identifying actions
Actions are the concrete execution of your strategic priorities. This is where the rubber hits the road and where the planning process becomes tangible. In order to keep stress at bay, I needed to ensure that the activities I carried out and the behaviours I adopted were holistic in nature. In other words, it wasn’t just the workplace that needed fixing but also what I did in the evenings and at the weekends. The actions listed below were how I planned to execute my strategic priorities, identified in the previous section.
Step 4 – Reviewing your performance
The one area of the business planning process that often gets least attention in the corporate arena is taking the time to review how the brand or business have performed. Which actions have been carried out? How successfully? What have you learned? What will you do differently next time around?
With this in mind, I made sure that I sat down periodically, often with my wife, and reviewed our action plan. A few years later (please don’t laugh!) I actually scored myself against each of the four quadrants. It had been, on balance, a very satisfying period in my life. Room for improvement in all categories for sure, but overall it had been a solid effort all round. It would score a very commendable 30 out of 40!!
I suspect a number of readers will be chuckling quietly now at this attempt to bring the world of business into the personal arena. And yes, at face value, it does seem a little bit over the top, I must admit. But this was how I was, how I still am today. It’s my way of navigating a path through life by providing some structure.
However, I bet there are quite a few closet “theory nuts” right now, nodding approvingly. I also suspect that a number of you will shortly be investing in a little notebook and some highlighter pens.
Welcome to the club.
Mark Simmonds runs an innovation agency GENIUS YOU and is the author of new book Beat Stress At Work