Armed with this additional intelligence, we now know to carry an umbrella on rainy days; always walk with our eyes open; and use that footbridge regularly (and leave the waders at home). Suddenly, we are no longer getting dirtied up in muddy pools. We have increased our capacity for sustained improvement. (And our performance review ratings are way up, to boot.)
Resolutions are best effected when they are undergirded by a concrete plan. By conducting our own personal SWOT analysis, we better equip ourselves to formulate a sound plan for improving our Torah-true performance l’atid. Perhaps this is one of the meanings of the pasuk in Eichah (3:40), “Nachpesa dracheinu v’nachkora v’nashuva ad Hashem” – “Let us search and examine our ways and return to Hashem.”
In what ways did you perform well last year, and in what ways not? What were the barriers to better performance? And on the flip side, what were those factors that facilitated your success and helped you shine? Use that intelligence to identify the resources and strategies you can harness in the coming year to continue to improve in your areas of success, to accomplish in new areas, and to reduce your “failures” and setbacks.
By scrutinizing all our deeds – bad and good – and what facilitated them, we will be better positioned to prevent recurrence of the misdeeds, and to increase the desirable ones. We will be better positioned to grab hold of the Tree of Life (Mishlei 3:18).
Ideally, a good strategic plan enables an organization to fulfill its mission, to get “from here to there” in the most effective, efficient way.
Elul, a time when we are accustomed to take stock of where and who we are and what we hope to change is, by definition, the perfect time for our personal strategic planning – for each of us to consider how we plan to “get from here to there” in our life. Strategic planning is about first seeing and understanding the big picture – the forest, if you will – in relation to how it fits each person’s respective resource portfolio, and then using that understanding to make decisions about the trees. (Which type of forest will my particular ecosystem best support? What species of trees should I plant? What types of mitzvot should I especially focus on? What will grow best in my forest? Where will I place each tree? How many new ones will I plant each year?)
Elul is the time to:
- once again revisit and reexamine our mission statement. Why are we here? What do we hope to accomplish? What is our vision for the future?
- conduct a SWOT analysis: An assessment of our current resources – deficits and assets.
- update our outline of the goals, objectives, and activities which, in leveraging our resources, will advance us toward fulfillment of our mission.
Too often in Elul we lose sight of the forest (our overall mission and how we can leverage our many assets to accomplish it) for the trees – the minutia of our missteps. We get bogged down in the details of our deficits, and fail to recognize the multitude of resources at hand for our redemption.
Though the days of Elul and the Yamim Noraim are the time to take stock of our mistakes and shortcomings, if we truly want to do as full a teshuvah as possible we would be wise to evaluate our strengths and accomplishments as surely as we scrutinize our weaknesses. Why?
Because . . .
- We can then use them in service of not repeating the same misdeeds again.
- It helps us identify barriers to success and consider ways to overcome them.
- It helps us identify gateways to success and consider ways to increase them.
- It gives us hope and balance in our outlook.
- It helps us appreciate what our better self is capable of.