The truth is that everyone will experience varying degrees of success and failure during their life. It’s an inescapable fact. No one who ever made it somewhere in terms of accomplishments did so by following a straight path to the top. For most it’s a zig zag of give and take, where one might take 2 steps forward followed by 4 steps back. So then the question becomes this: If I am surely going to fail and succeed at different points of my life, how can I work to reduce risk and increase the likelihood that I spend more time succeeding and less time failing? All of this has to do with identifying and leveraging your personal strengths.
How to Identify Your Personal Strengths
You may not be sure exactly what your personal strengths are, so how are you to go about leveraging them? If you first need to pinpoint your strengths, follow these tips.
1. Know Yourself
Step one in my mind is to exercise some self-awareness and start evaluating yourself in order to make a few key determinations about your personality and general outlook on life. Put simply, this step could be described with the phrase, “Know yourself.” Who could be better than you in identifying your own core strengths and weaknesses? Taking the time to better understand those strengths and weaknesses will help to provide some context or foundational background for you to then project forward to try and imagine what your future may hold. If you haven’t previously taken the time to really evaluate where you stand as a person and analyze your own skillsets, strengths, weaknesses, and long term objectives in life, then you are definitely holding yourself back from where you could be as an individual. Knowing yourself and taking the time to learn even more about yourself is vital in working towards maximizing your strengths.
2. Ask a Friend
Interestingly enough, some research out there that suggests the near opposite of the above: perhaps others know you better than you know yourself. So ask! On Oprah.com, the writer Barbara Sher suggests that one way to better identify your own strengths is to “Ask your friend to name three of your strengths.”[1] I also like this approach because it removes the potential for personal biases to impact your own self-assessment. Our friends have a solid window into our personality and often are as equipped to help us identify our strengths and weaknesses because they have a valuable outsider perspective. It’s probably a good idea to take your own self-assessment, bounce that information off of a friend and compare notes. If there are areas of overlap, then you might be headed in the right direction. If not, then perhaps you need to scrutinize either your own self-assessment or your friend’s assessment and see if the truth lies somewhere in between the two. Whichever method you take, it is important that during this part of the process you take an honest assessment of yourself because if you are unwilling to make an honest judgement of your own strengths and weaknesses, then this exercise will be futile. We are probably all generally aware of the areas that we excel in as well as where we are lacking.
3. Find Clues in Your Attempts and Failures
As we all get older, the hope is that we also become more self-aware. Why? As we experience life in a one way direction, we ought to learn some things through the process of trying and failing. I learned how powerful love could be after I got my heart broken by my first girlfriend. I learned how much I appreciated a steady paycheck after I got fired from a job. I learned how to be a better driver after experiencing for my first major car wreck. Failure is indeed a foundational piece of building long term success in any pursuit. Through our failures we become more equipped to recognize future hazards and engrain those lessons into the fiber of our being so that we ultimately see gains from what were once losses. In the middle of a failure, it is almost impossible to see these lessons. It isn’t until after the storm has passed that you begin to put the puzzle pieces together and find the lesson to be learned in that situation. The important thing to remember is that in your failings, in your moments where you fall short, if you pay enough attention you might be able to start identifying the weaknesses in your own life that may have a hand in those failures, and if you are smart, you will start trying to learn how to minimize those issues and maximize what you are great at so that you see a path to success start to develop.
4. Analyze Your Successes
While failure can be a great teacher at times, success also begets more success. Any experience, whether positive or negative, can be a teaching tool for the individual if that individual is willing to utilize it. The key, of course, is to get into the thick of things and start finding ways to gain that necessary experience. So often at corporate companies I hear the phrase, “You’ve got to put in your time,” referencing the idea that you have to put a certain amount of years into a company before you start to see that result in a positive correlation within your career.
5. Maintain a Hold on Your Identity
Whether you are trying to be a good parent or a good employee, it’s important that you as an individual have an extremely strong grip on your own identity. Knowing yourself will be paramount in your aim to leverage those strengths in order to experience future success.
6. Use a Strength Test
If at the end of this you still find yourself questioning what your own strengths are, then you can look into taking a “strength test.” These are designed to help users identify their own strengths with the idea that our own individual biases could have an impact on how we evaluate our own strengths, and the test is implemented to help erase those biases.[2]
How to Leverage Your Personal Strengths
The idea of leveraging your personal strengths in order to capitalize on your skill set and propel yourself towards success is one that we should all consider and aim to pursue. You can think about leverage by envisioning a see-saw. Typically on a see-saw, one person puts all of their weight on one end of the see-saw, which then propels the other person up into the air. In the same way, if you utilized your personal strengths as the foundation for your growth, you would see a positive correlation as your success increased.
Invest in Yourself
Another element to consider is to think about how investing in yourself is actually very different than how we invest in the stock markets. When you invest in the stock market, most experts will tell you that you should diversify your asset classes or invest in index funds so that you aren’t concentrated in a singular position that could potentially weigh down your portfolio. This is the exact opposite approach that one should take when looking to identify and leverage your personal strengths. When it comes to capitalizing on one’s strengths, you should be looking to invest more of your time, energy, and money into a more singularly focused move that builds up your greatest strengths or skillsets. Andrew Carnegie said of investing, I’d say that is a bad approach for investing when looking at S&P benchmark performance year after year, but when it comes to your own strengths as an individual, it is an excellent approach. Not only should you be putting your eggs in a smaller range of baskets when working on your strengths, but also when you work on your weaknesses. If you are fantastic at communicating and managing relationships but terrible at sales, then it makes sense to me that you’d pour more resources into making a sale.
Identify and Improve Your Weaknesses
In order to leverage your strengths, you should focus on what areas of weakness exist in your current body of work and then work to shore those areas of weakness up in order to create a broader foundation for success. In decreasing your areas of weakness and growing their strength, you will doing what you are aiming to do in looking to leverage your strengths. Reducing weakness allows for you as an individual to perform at a higher level and naturally lends more power to the strengths that you have in your repertoire.
Final Thoughts
Whatever method you take in order to identify your strengths, remember that no success happens overnight. You as the individual have to work hard to identify your strengths and then work out a way in which to leverage them to your overall benefit and growth. It will take time and research, but if you are reading this article, you are already on your way!
More Tips on Personal Strengths
10 Ways to Find Your Own Personal Strengths Strengths-Based Personal Development 7 Steps to Turn Your Weaknesses into Strengths
Featured photo credit: Julian Santa Ana via unsplash.com
