Position awareness gives you a framework for understanding your strategic position. It also enables you to see your position as part of a larger environment surrounded by other positions. You can understand which aspect of your position are secure and which are the most dynamic and likely to change.
Sun Tzu's strategy defines a "position" as what is known about a given competitor. To understand you own position, Sun Tzu's methods force you to see yourself in the eyes of others. Using these techniques, you broaden your perspective by gathering a range of viewpoints. In a limited sense, the scope of your position defines your area of control within your larger environment.
In traditional strategy, five elements--mission, climate, ground, command, and methods--define the dimensions in which competitors can be compared.
The Key Viewpoints
As an individual, you have a unique and valuable viewpoint, but every viewpoint is inherently limited by its own position. The result is that people cannot get a useful perspective on their own situations and surrounding opportunities. The first formula of positioning awareness involve learning what information is relevant. The most advanced techniques teach how to gather that information and put it into a bigger picture. The second formula, called the Find Friends Formula, describes the range of different viewpoints you need to make contact with to get perspective on your position.
Most people see their lives as the sum of their past successes and failures. Most people dwell on their mistakes while simultaneously sitting on their laurels. Sun Tzu's strategy forces you to see your position differently. How you arrived at your current position doesn't matter. In this framework, the only thing that matters is where you are going and how you are going to get there. As you begin to develop your strategic reflexes, you start to think more and more about how to secure your current position and advance it.
Seeing the Big Picture
Most people see all the details of their lives, but they cannot see what those detail mean in terms of the big picture. As you master position awareness, you don't see your life as a point but as a path. You see your position in terms of what is changing and what resources are available. You are more aware of your ability to make decisions and your skills in working with others.
Most importantly, this strategic system forces you to get in touch with your core set of goals and values.
Untrained people usually see their life in terms of absolutes: successes and failures, good luck and bad, weakness and strength. As you begin to master position awareness, you begin to see all comparisons of strength and weakness are temporary and relative. A position is not strong or weak in itself. Its strength or weakness depends on how it compares or "fits" with surrounding positions. Weakness and strength are not what a position is, but how you use it.
The Power of Perspective
Positional awareness gives you the specialized vocabulary you need to understanding how situations develop. Mastering this vocabulary, you begin to see the leverage points connecting past and future. You replace vague conceptions of "strength," "momentum," and "innovation" with much more pragmatic definitions that you can actually use on a day to day basis.
Mastering position awareness also changes your relationships with other people. It teaches you a different way of judging truth and character. This methods allow you to spot self-deception and dishonest in others. It also allows you to understand how you can best work with others to compensate for your different weaknesses.
Once you develop a good perspective of position, it naturally leads you to want to learn more about how you can improve you position through opportunity development.