Where are you right now? What is your location and present situation?

Having an accurate assessment of our current circumstances is very important. As novelist and poet Wendell Berry notes:

“If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.” – Wendell Berry

The importance of situational awareness

“Show me where you are.”

The sergeant looked at me expectedly, waiting for me to point out my location on the map. It was a simple question, and in most cases, a simple thing to answer but in this situation, it was not straightforward.

I, along with a group of other military trainees, had just been dropped off from the back of a truck. We had been travelling for over an hour and, during that time, we had not been able to see much due to the canvas covering the vehicle. The only glimpses of the outside world were through the flapping material to the rear, and that view was usually little more than a receding track.

So, in this case, the question (from the slightly scary senior non-commissioned officer) triggered immediate feelings of anxiety.

I took some deep breaths to stem the rising panic.

Having wrestled my pre-frontal cortex back from this temporary amygdala hijacking, I started to think. Where was I? What clues could I see that would help me identify my exact location?

We were not allowed to use a GPS device but there were other things to help me. I knew where I had started and, with a rough time and distance appreciation, I could at least guess at the general area we had been dropped at. Next, looking at the relief of the land, I could see a couple of distinct hills and the track intersected with a nearby stream in a re-entrant (small valley). I found similar features on my map and then made sure their alignment was correct by using my compass.

Don’t start moving forward until you know where you are

I looked up from the map and, using a blade of grass, pointed out where I thought I was to the sergeant. He gave no sign that I was either right or wrong. He just said, “Your next checkpoint is at grid 385957. The clock has started.”

The pressure of the situation rose again. More deep breaths. This was a timed march and we had to finish the course in under the set time or risk failing the course. I quickly found the grid reference on the map and started to take a bearing that would give me my starting direction.

As I was trying to do this, I saw people running off in various directions. Worry again. How had they finished so fast? Were they trying to go to the same place? If so, weren’t they going the wrong way? Or had I got the location wrong?

I suppressed the urge to start running. As people left the area, I swiftly re-checked my logic. I came to the same conclusion. my location was correct; I was ready to set off. Stowing my map, I fixed my eyes on a feature in the distance, as indicated by my compass, and started the shuffling run of the over-burdened soldier.

Fortunately, I got it right and I completed the test. Not everyone was so lucky. Hours later, after the cut-off, various figures hauled themselves and their heavy rucksacks back into the wagon. Their bodies sagged with defeat. I recognised many of the same faces that I had seen dashing off prematurely at the start.

The GPS Tool: A Personal SWOT Analysis.

I was not fortunate enough to have a GPS then but most of the time now, when I am in the mountains or on an expedition, I carry a GPS device. It is a great tool for quickly and accurately confirming one’s location. Along with other tools, such as a map and compass, one can build a good picture of the situation.

In our life’s journey, it is also important to periodically confirm our current position so we can make good choices about our next steps. We need to understand where we are to ensure we successfully get where we want to go.

Various conceptual tools can help with this, but it is hard to beat the SWOT analysis. Like a GPS, it gives us a quick snapshot of where we are and provides the data we need to do an effective situational assessment.

You have likely come across the SWOT Analysis tool before, but you might not have used it as a tool to examine your personal circumstances. We might think we know where we are and roughly what our situation is, but what does that actually mean? As Malcolm Gladwell puts it:

“The key to good decision-making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.” – Malcolm Gladwell

The SWOT analysis allows us to quickly identify the key themes of our current situation and then analyse them to have a better understanding and then make better decisions about future direction.

How to do a Personal SWOT analysis

To do a personal SWOT analysis you can follow these simple steps:

Step 1: Create

The SWOT table is created this way:

• Strengths and weaknesses are usually listed in the first row of the matrix; S and then W. These relate to internal factors.
• Opportunities and threats are external issues or circumstances. These create the second row; O and then T.
• In this layout, the first column, strengths and opportunities, are the positive or helpful factors
• The second column, weaknesses and threats, are the potentially negative or harmful issues

Step 2: Brainstorm

Now, brainstorm as many different considerations as you can under each heading to fill out the matrix.

Here are some questions to help you:

Strengths (internal/personal):

• What are your key skills, areas of experience or expertise?
• Can you define what makes you different? What is your USP (unique selling point/proposition)?
• What are your core values? What do you love, enjoy, or prioritise?

Weaknesses (internal/personal):

• What do you not enjoy doing?
• Where have you failed or fallen behind others?
• What skill gaps do you have?

 Threats (external/circumstantial):

• What circumstances are most troubling you?
• Who is your major competition?
• Which challenge is the most important right now?
• What is the worst thing that could happen to you/?

Opportunities (external/circumstantial):

• How can you leverage your present situation?
• Who/what could most help you right now?
• How is change providing new openings?

Step 3: Prioritise

Now prioritise the items in each section and work out which are the top three to five things in each quadrant.

Step 4: Analyse

Look at each item in turn and consider the actions you could take. Here are some questions to help:

• How can you play to or maximise your strengths?
• What personal development goals, people and processes can help address your weaknesses?
• How can you exploit, expand or multiply the opportunities?
• What control measures do you need to put in place to limit the threats?

Now look for any further relationships you can identify across the columns, rows and diagonals.

Remember that weaknesses are often a reflection of strengths. For example, if you have a strength in that you are very good at coming up with lots of ideas, or you are a business with lots of products, a weakness might be that you find it hard to focus on just one of them.

Similarly, look at the flip side of external factors; you may find that threats can also provide opportunities.

Personal situational awareness: know where you are and what that means

The instructions above are taken from a longer post, so if you would like more background on the SWOT analysis and an example then please read: How to Do a SWOT Analysis

You can also watch the YouTube video for further explanation and a visual of how to create a personal SWOT template.

Once you are happy, take some time to do a personal SWOT analysis and note down your findings. Sometimes that means facing some unpleasant realities but confronting the brutal facts (as per the Stockdale Paradox) is a crucial element of planning for a successful outcome. As writer James Baldwin observed:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced” – James Baldwin

If you are feeling stressed, take a few moments to look at this picture. Don’t rush and read on just yet; give yourself a few seconds to take in the colours, think about how you feel, and identify the little blue dot.

Don’t try and rub your screen, the dot is supposed to be there! So what is it? A dust particle caught in a ray of sunlight?

Guess again. This is actually a picture of us. The greatest selfie ever taken; this is the photo of our planet that the Voyager 1 probe took from a distance of about 6 billion kilometres, as it passed beyond Neptune. At this distance the Earth takes up less than a pixel’s space on the picture (by the way there are 640,000 other pixels in that image).

The Voyager mission was launched in 1977. It took 13 years for Voyager 1 to travel to the point where it took this photo. Voyager 1 carried on though and in 2013 Voyager 1 actually left the solar system, the first human made object to do so.

How do we manage stress?

Stress is natural, even helpful, but too much of it can be a bad thing. Stress helps us react to challenges and to grow, but too much stress can break us. When we talk about ‘being stressed’ we generally mean being overburdened. When we feel overly stressed it is good to have some techniques to manage the stress and, where possible, turn the pressure into something positive.

One such approach to dealing with stress is keeping a proper perspective.

Have you ever had a challenge in your sights, a test, exam, deadline or project that looked impossibly big, until you were passed it?

Whatever issues we face it is important to acknowledge the facts and have proper situational awareness, but our ability to focus on something – to look closely – often makes challenges seem bigger than they really are.

How do you keep things in perspective?

If you feel yourself getting stressed try to lift your eyes up from the problem and see the bigger picture. I often find that doing this physically can help. Go for a walk somewhere beautiful; look at the ocean, the mountains, the night’s sky.

I find it useful to take time out and contemplate creation to give a broader perspective. Whether I look at the complexity of a blade of grass or the vastness of the solar system, it helps to put my challenges, concerns and ideas into there proper place.

The Wisdom we gain from Perspective

The astronomer Carl Sagan sums things up really well in this thought provoking speech about the Voyager photo:

“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.“

Carl Sagan, speech at Cornell University, October 13, 1994

See the bigger picture

With environmental issues creeping up in the public consciousness and the political agenda, and yet with so much war and strife across much of our planet, it is good to reflect on our place in the universe and the responsibility with have to look after each other on our Pale Blue Dot.

If we want to lead ourselves and others well we need to keep a proper perspective. Perspective helps to reduce stress and gives us the understanding we need to make good decision and plan effectively.