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A Better Way to Discover Your Strengths
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How to recognize your strengths
If you want to excel at anything, it’s not enough to fix your weaknesses. You also need to leverage your strengths.
If you want to recognize your strengths, you need other people to hold up a...
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Choose your sources
Identify 10-20 people who know you well from a mix of personal and professional contacts, and ask them to write a story about a time when you were at your best. It is best if the ...
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Spot patterns
Once the feedback arrives, look for the common themes that appear in multiple stories. Make a list of the themes, the key examples that support each theme, and what they suggest about your strength...
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Create your self-portrait
When the stories roll in, you’ll be surprised to see that some of your sources comment on strengths you didn’t know...
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Put your strengths into action
Create an action plan for how and when you’ll utilize your strengths.
If you don’t map out a plan for using your strengths, the benefits will fade.
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Developing our strengths
Although we usually see our weaknesses as more changeable than our strengths, research shows that we should not focus on improving our weak parts, but to develop our strengths.
Identifying strengths
Try to see your strengths in relation to what energizes you. Something is a strength if:
- it makes you feel successful
- you're drawn to it
- it fully engages you
- after doing that activity, you feel energized and fulfilled.
Ask the people around you
It's difficult for us to see our own strengths, but people around us (friends, coworkers, family members, mentors) will most likely see them clearly.
The goal is to identify things that you wouldn't have thought of on your own—or to find patterns.