Why Students Should Do SWOT Analysis for College Success?

It is a myth that only intelligent people are creative. Research shows that once you get beyond an I.Q of about 120, which is just a little above average, intelligence and creativity are not at all related which means even if you’re not more intelligent than most people, you still have the potential to wield extraordinary creative powers. So why do so few people have high creativity? Because there are bad habits, people learn as they grow up which ruins the creative pathways in the brain and like all bad habits can be diminished with work! Let’s look at 8 of those worst habits:

1. Creating and Evaluating Simultaneously

You can’t drive a car in first gear and reverse at the same time. Likewise, you can’t conceive ideas and judge them as you create them. That’s like playing tennis against yourself. You have to shut down the part of your brain that judges (left side) and let the part that creates (right side) do its job.

2. Over-thinking

This habit goes along with creating and evaluating simultaneously. The more you think about an idea, the less likely you will like it. The trick is to give yourself some time away from an idea before giving it a final judgment.

3. Perfectionism

This habit goes along with over-thinking and can be just as destructive. You’ll never come up with great ideas if you worry about them not being perfect. If you’re unwilling to risk making mistakes and accepting some flaws, then you’re depriving yourself of great ideas.

4. A Desire for Certainty

Similarly, your brain wants to be certain about things and will stop at nothing until it is. This creates a mental block that keeps new ideas and makes you conservative. If you want to be more creative, you have to be willing to take risks and embrace uncertainty.

5. Avoiding Change

The world is constantly changing, and so is the market for your products or services. If you’re not changing with it, you’ll quickly fall behind. This doesn’t mean you have to abandon everything you’ve currently got and start over.

6. Focusing on the Negative

Most people have a default “negativity” switch that gets flipped whenever adversity strikes. But this has serious consequences for your creativity. Negative emotions shift you into a cognitive mode where you’re more likely to judge than create. To be creative, you have to learn to focus on the positive.

7. Judging Yourself Harshly

This habit goes hand in hand with a focus on the negative. If you’re constantly putting yourself down, it’s going to be hard to come up with great ideas. You have to be your own best advocate and be willing to give yourself some credit.

8. Procrastination

This is the last habit we’ll discuss, and it’s one of the worst. Procrastination kills creativity because it breeds anxiety and stress. And as we’ve already seen, those are two of the biggest enemies of creativity.

So there you have it! Eight habits that can kill your creativity. But don’t worry, they can all be broken, and you can begin to make some serious strides in your creative work as soon as you’re ready!

How to Do a SWOT Analysis

College students, you need to break the bad habits holding you back!  You can’t drive a car in first gear and reverse simultaneously. Likewise, you shouldn’t try to use different types of thinking simultaneously. You’ll strip your mental gears.

Creating means generating new ideas, visualizing, looking ahead, considering the possibilities. Evaluating means analyzing and judging, picking apart ideas and sorting them into piles of good and evil, useful or useless.  Most people evaluate too soon and too often; therefore, they create less. To create more and better ideas (and graduate!), you must separate creation from evaluation, coming up with lots of ideas first then judging their worth later.

The key to breaking this evaluative habit is to start with a SWOT analysis. SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. The first step is to list your strengths and weaknesses (internal factors) then identify opportunities and threats (external factors).

Once you have your list, you can start generating new ideas. For example, if you are weak in public speaking but see that one of your opportunities is to give presentations to larger groups, then you can come up with a strategy to improve your public speaking. Or, if you see that one of your threats is a competitor who has a similar product at a lower price, you can come up with a marketing strategy to differentiate your product.

The key is to get the creative juices flowing and generate new ideas. The SWOT analysis is a great way to do that. So, stop evaluating and start creating!

The SWOT analysis is a great way to get started on your journey to breaking bad habits and improving your creativity. Now that you know the benefits of using SWOT to free your mind from creative thinking, you can incorporate this strategy into your daily life.

Start with a large piece of paper and draw four quadrants. List your strengths in one column, then list your weaknesses across the top. Do the same for opportunity and threat—put them in their respective quadrants. Once you have your list, you can start generating new ideas.

For example, if you are weak in public speaking but see that one of your opportunities is to give presentations to larger groups, then you can come up with a strategy to improve your public speaking. Or, if you see that one of your threats is a competitor who has a similar product at a lower price, you can come up with a marketing strategy to differentiate your product.

The key is to get the creative juices flowing and generate new ideas. The SWOT analysis is a great way to do that. So, stop evaluating and start creating!

Now that you know how to do a SWOT analysis, you can use this strategy to improve your creativity and break bad habits. Start with a large piece of paper and list your strengths in one column, then list your weaknesses across the top. Do the same for opportunity and threat. Once you have your list, start generating new ideas!

The key is to get the creative juices flowing and generate new ideas. The SWOT analysis is a great way to do that. So, stop evaluating and start creating!

When you are finished, please read the following article, which explains how Design Thinkers use this strategy in their creative process.

Conclusion

A SWOT analysis is a helpful strategy to help you break bad habits and improve your creativity. Start with a large piece of paper and list your strengths in one column, then list your weaknesses across the top. Do the same for opportunity and threat. Once you have your list, start generating new ideas! The key is to get the creative juices flowing and generate new ideas. The SWOT analysis is a great way to do that. So, stop evaluating and start creating!