You spring out of bed in the morning. You just can’t wait to get to work, and once you get there, your mood is infectious. Colleagues are uplifted when they see you smile. You help drive this creative and motivated team who are doing great things.

This is a fully charged business. It sounds idealistic, but this is a worthy and realistic goal. Charging up your business will require concentration and effort, and it all starts with you.

With a motivated team working with the same focus, your business will boom. Whether you are general staff or the general manager, being personally recharged will do wonders for your performance. This in turn will boost everyone around you to achieve greater success.

Getting to this state of recharge is not about going on holiday once a year. It is a constant lifestyle pursuit. A personal balance is required between all of the following areas; career and business, health and fitness, financial security, personal growth, personal relationships, community interaction, and recreation and leisure. Each of these areas requires its own comprehensive, disciplined attention to different detail, so let’s just concentrate on boosting your career and business.

Recharging your career and business is quite a broad subject, so let’s concentrate on you as an individual, and not you and your team. Keep in mind that methods to recharge yourself can apply just as well to the team.

Assuming that your career or business has a clear mission, your career and business life can be divided very generally into your technical skills and your management skills. The evolution of technical skills can be a reasonably straightforward thing. It is the evolution of management skills that many people at all organizational levels can do with recharging.

Management skills can be divided into four basics:

  1. Focus (you have a lot to do quickly without distractions)
  2. Delegate (know what tasks can be assigned to others to allow you to hone in on what’s most important)
  3. Act when required (when you have focus and delegate, you have the time to do what you do best)
  4. Prioritize (knowing what can be left for later).

When you are in a mental slump at work there is one simple thing you should do first, and that is to clean your desk. In a slump, it’s the first thing to suffer, but there is more to it than just being tidy. This act invokes those four basic management skills.

Each piece of paper on your desk will present questions to be answered. Does it need focused attention now, can it be put aside for later, or can it be discarded altogether? Can it be delegated? Does it need action now? Where does it stand in relation to your other priorities?

Clearing your desk is an easy but powerful thing to do, so allocate a small amount of time to do it. Once done you can do something else to recharge yourself even further, that is to do a personal strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats (SWOT) analysis.

Doing a SWOT analysis won’t solve all your business problems. Nor does it generate a comprehensive plan or provide the information you need to do so. It is simply a tool to clarify your situation to help you move forward. It can generate real self-insight, helping you recharge by giving renewed personal direction, and it is an effective way to assess where and how you can improve yourself. All of this is good for business.

Your strengths are the things you feel most comfortable, proficient and enjoyable doing. Improving your strengths, taking them from good to excellent, will be very rewarding with little work for big results. Your strengths can be used also to reveal opportunities for leadership. Concentrate and focus on strengths because you can do the most with them.

Your weaknesses are the things you don’t like doing and never really want to do. Improving your weaknesses, taking them from bad to average, will take a lot of effort and can be frustrating and a lot of hard work for little reward. Your weaknesses, however, are an opportunity to delegate and manage. Keep in mind, improving weaknesses a little can improve how you handle things generally.

Opportunities will always be there, but by developing your strengths, you will see more opportunities and be able to act on them more quickly and effectively.

Threats can come from inside you, like lack of confidence or lack of focus, and they can come from outside, like economic downturns or pressure from competitors. Identifying threats and acting to combat them can actually lead to more opportunities, especially when you are an improved personal state by having already worked on your strengths and delegated your weaknesses.

Clearing your desk and working on your personal SWOT analysis are simple things that can make a significant improvement in the way you personally act and feel. It can be good to get others to help you with your personal SWOT analysis because they can often see things you cannot, or they can help you see some good things that you under-appreciate. However, doing it alone is still a good thing to do.

You can also take all this further by getting your team to do these both personally and then at a collaborative team level. Team SWOT analysis can be also a great brain-storming process which can lead to unexpected opportunities. These methods are simple and the simpler things are, the easier they are to achieve. The easier they are to achieve, the more likely they are to get done.

A personal recharge may be all you need to get your business on a better more prosperous path to success.