the STRATEGY in YOUR LIFE

Everyone who got to where he is, had to start from where he was.

Developing a strategic plan for your life

What are your ultimate goals in life? Happiness?

Before we come up with the strategies we should undertake, we have to first, determine the goals that we want in our lives. One of the biggest challenges that most people have is to find out what they really want in their life. It can be presumptuous yet logical to say that we all want happiness in our life.  

One may question the validity of this argument, but it could hold true for almost all circumstances. For instance, we could have a man who chose to work in a job which he dislikes in order to support his family. Is his goal to be happy? Yes, the ability to feed his family is more than enough to outweigh other things that he might dislike in the job. That alone, makes him happy and satisfied enough.

After we have established that happiness could potentially be a goal for most people, we now face the problem of defining this goal. What is happiness? Most people can’t define what happiness is, but they do know it when they feel it.

Goals as a general rule of thumb should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. (Elaborated on previous article) This means to say, that we have to come up with metrics to measure how well we have attained our goals. This is akin to doing business whereby we use ratios like return on equity and stock price to give us a good gauge as to how well our business has performed.

The strategies

In order to determine these metrics, we got to first uncover what are the drivers that make us happy. The same things in life may mean differently for different people. We must know what are the things that we value in our lives. Some of the drivers could include having material riches, good health or having a wonderful family. Each of these drivers would be a potential strategy to reach to the goal of being happy. That is, by being rich, having a great family and in good health, are the pathways to attaining this ultimate goal.

The tactics

After determining the strategies that would allow us to attain the goal of being happy, we would now have to come up with a set of tactics for each strategy. Tactics are a set of steps that one would have to implement to allow the strategy to materialize.

For example, to attain the strategy of having good health, it would require tactics like, having a balanced diet, going for regular workouts, cutting down on alcoholic drinks and cigarettes and good sleeping habits. All these should be measurable and specific at best. One can aim to go for a run at least twice a week and cut down the number of packets one smokes from three to one a week.

The value of a strategic plan

The process of setting your goals, establishing the strategies that make up the goals and eventually coming up with the various tactics that will support the strategies, may not be an easy task initially. But once done, it would give one a very good overview of how one has conducted his life. It would also allow a person to see the gap between what he expects to have in his life and what he has been doing.

Recognizing the limitations

Having explained how to go about developing a strategic plan to manage our life, we also have to be realistic about what we want to accomplish. While it is good to aim high, we have to be practical in our approach as well. There is a difference between what we want to do and what we can do feasibly.

Identify your core competencies

Just like in business, where we use a SWOT analysis to evaluate the strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats that are inherent in a company, we could do likewise for ourselves. It cannot be over emphasized how important it is for us to be clearly aware of what we are good in and what we might not be so capable of. It is only by doing so, that we can seek to capitalize on our strengths and do highly productive activities. Too often, we have people spending excessive time working on their weaknesses while neglecting their own strengths.

Find your own niche. Do not ever feel discouraged when your peers perform better than you. Different people have different strengths. A lesson that we can learn in the business world is the use of the Blue Ocean strategy.

The Blue Ocean strategy involves the creation of new markets by reducing and eliminating features that customers didn’t find essential while raising and creating new features that ultimately redefined a market. For instance, for Southwest Airlines, they made air travel more friendly, approachable, and affordable- by decreasing the costs of air travel comparable to that of vehicular transportation while eliminating meals, lounges, and seating choices.

Relating this back to us, it means that we do not have to follow the exact same things that you have seen other successful people does in order to be successful. Different people succeed for different reasons. You do not have to fight head-on with the same things that other people are doing in order to succeed!

A self-discovery process

Also, while developing this strategic plan, it could help to enhance our self-awareness and be more clear about who we are as a person and what we stand for. Just like in marketing, we are always building a ‘brand image’ of ourselves. The perceptions that our target audience have of us are pretty dependent on the tactics that we employ in our daily lives. How do we want to be positioned? Do we want to be perceived favorably or negatively? It is all up to us. There is a brand in everyone of us, like it or not.

Leap of faith

Lastly, one must understand that be it in life or business, results may not show up immediately. We can all learn a lesson from the Chinese bamboo tree. After planting the seed of this amazing tree, you see nothing, absolutely nothing, for four years except for a tiny shoot coming out of its bulb. During the first four years, all the growth takes place underground. But then in the fifth year the Chinese bamboo tree suddenly starts to grow above the ground level up to eighty feet tall. Just because the results are not showing in the short term, it doesn’t mean that they are not manifesting.

A simplified version of a SWOT analysis and Y-tree is done for “Daniel” who wants to improve his financial situation as shown below to illustrate how we could make use of strategic planning in our life

(Click on the pictures to get a clearer view or if the images fail to display)

(Click on the pictures to get a clearer view or if the images fail to display)

 

 

 

(Source of “What is Strategy?” image above is by Dr. Adel F Dimian, Practice Associate Professor of Management)

Article Written by Ng Zhi Wei on 01.04.08

~ by Ng Zhi Wei on April 1, 2008.