We’ve looked at how you can use strategic thinking every day but which areas of your life will benefit from strategic thinking?
The answer is simple but might seem incredible: it can help with all of them. Strategic thinking can help you sort through the various parts of your life. It can help you whittle down the goals you think you want, to the ones you actually do want. Then it can help you come up with a way to accomplish those.
You now know that strategic thinking can be as helpful to your personal life as it can be to any large organisation. People are much more complex than businesses, schools, or governments. They tend to have only one goal or type of goal, such as making money or educating people.
Each person has a number of different aspects to their personality and their life. These aspects each involve various and sometimes conflicting goals and impose different requirements on your life. Your health goals might conflict with the requirements of work, for example, and work goals can conflict with personal goals. Many of my clients come to see me because they want to become pain free (health goal) but sitting at a desk all day (requirement of work) has resulted in back pain or shoulder pain.
All of this means that each person has a tremendously complicated life and must wade through the conflicts and contradictions. How can strategic thinking help with this? In which areas of life might it help?
Strategic thinking can help you in your career by helping you decide what you want to get from it and then helping you create a plan to do just that. You can use it to anticipate and deal with the inevitable frustrations that will come up along the way.
It can help you with your education by allowing you to tie what you want to study into what you want to do with the rest of your life. You can then make the best choice about what to study (or even whether to do so.) It can also help you develop a plan for how to pursue your education in the best manner.
What about your personal life, your relationships? Strategic thinking can help you decide if you want a partner at all and what qualities you want in one. That way you don’t approach the search haphazardly.
Other aspects of your life, such as community involvement, religion or spirituality, your hobbies, and things such as traveling can all benefit from strategic thinking. So when we consider which areas of our life can benefit from strategic thinking, the answer is simple. It’s all of them.