On Self-Awareness: Your Strengths & Weaknesses
Understanding your superhero abilities - and your kryptonite - will bring focus to your life.
Now that we’ve dipped our toes into the waters of your personality, let’s dive deeper into a crucial aspect of self-awareness: recognizing your strengths and weaknesses. This is more than just boosting your ego or dwelling on your flaws. It's a strategic approach to understanding what you bring to the table and where you might need extra support.
The Power of Knowing Your Strengths
What Are Strengths?
Strengths are your natural talents and abilities - the things you’re inherently good at. It could be your analytical skills, your way with words, your knack for building relationships, or your ability to innovate.
Your strengths may start as an ability you’re inherently good at; with focus, practice, and repetition, along with seeking opportunities to show and flex your abilities, your strengths get stronger. Conversely, without focus, your strengths erode.
Identifying Your Strengths
Reflect on your past successes; what made them possible, and what was your role in that success? Was it your creativity, determination, empathy, or something else? What is it that you do better than anyone else you know?
Ask for feedback from peers, mentors, or professors. Sometimes, others see strengths that you might overlook.
Consider which activities make you lose track of time, or 'in the flow'. These are usually areas where your strengths lie.
Take the High5 strengths assessment, available online. (Note: if you are not actively in the workforce, consider the Student version.) This 10-15 minute assessment will provide you evaluation and insight into your top five strengths. Want to go further? Pick up a copy of StrengthsFinder or purchase the High5 report following your assessment.
Leveraging Your Strengths
Use your strengths to guide your career path and job choices.
As you evaluate a role or job description, think to yourself, does it align with your strengths? One of the fastest routes to discontentment or burnout is pursuing a career path, role, or position that does not align to your strengths.
Develop your strengths further.
Just because something comes naturally, doesn’t mean it can’t be improved and refined. While this may sound counterintuitive, spending your effort on refining your strengths may be more effective than effort spent to enhance your weaknesses. Think of it this way; the best case scenario for improving your weaknesses is to reach an average or mediocre level. However, this doesn’t mean you should ignore your weaknesses; we’ll address this in the next section.
Don’t over-rely on your strengths - or risk your strength becoming a weakness.
The transition of strengths into weaknesses can be due to over-reliance. This occurs when one's natural talents or positive traits are used excessively or inappropriately. This often happens when a strength is not tempered or balanced with other skills or when it's applied without regard to context. Here are some examples to illustrate when strengths can turn into weaknesses:
Confidence into Arrogance
Confidence helps in leadership, decision-making, and risk-taking. However, when overused or unrestrained by humility, it can turn into arrogance. An overly confident person may stop listening to others' input, underestimate challenges, or make reckless decisions.
Attention to Detail into Perfectionism
Being detail-oriented is valuable for quality control and accuracy. Yet, when overdone, it can become perfectionism. This may lead to inefficiency, micromanagement, or an inability to complete tasks due to overemphasis on minor details.
Assertiveness into Aggressiveness
Assertiveness helps in effectively communicating one's needs and opinions. Over-reliance on assertiveness without empathy or consideration for others' perspectives can turn it into aggressiveness, leading to poor relationships and workplace conflicts.
Adaptability into Inconsistency
Adaptability is a strength in adjusting to changing environments. However, constantly changing your approach or opinions to suit the current situation can be perceived as inconsistency or unreliability, undermining trust and credibility.
Empathy into Over-Emotional Involvement
Empathy allows for understanding and connecting with others' feelings. But too much empathy can lead to over-involvement in others' emotional states, making it difficult to make objective decisions or leading to emotional burnout.
Risk-Taking into Recklessness
Willingness to take risks can lead to innovation and growth. However, excessive risk-taking without proper assessment can turn into recklessness, endangering oneself, the team, or the organization.
Helpfulness into Self-Neglect
Being helpful is a valued trait, but constantly putting others' needs before your own can lead to self-neglect, burnout, and being taken advantage of.
Passion into Obsession
Passion drives motivation and commitment. Yet, when it becomes an obsession, it can lead to imbalance, neglect of other important life areas, or burnout.
To prevent strengths from becoming weaknesses, it's crucial to practice self-awareness and moderation. Balancing your strengths with other complementary skills, being open to feedback, and adapting your approach to fit the context are all key strategies in maintaining the positive aspects of your strengths.
Facing Your Weaknesses
Weaknesses aren’t failures; they’re simply areas where you have room to grow. This might be technical skills, public speaking, time management, getting things done, or anything else that you find challenging and draining.
Identifying Weaknesses
Be honest with yourself about areas where you struggle. This requires humility and a willingness to be vulnerable.
Open yourself up to constructive criticism and be willing to listen. Feedback from peers, colleagues, and trusted advisors is invaluable.
Evaluate your strength assessment for potential weaknesses. Many strengths have a “dark side.” For example: if your strength is “detail-focused”, a weakness may be an inability to see the larger vision.
Working on Your Weaknesses
Develop a plan to improve. This might involve additional training, finding a mentor, or exercising a skill regularly with deliberate practice.
Find strategies to mitigate weaknesses. For example, if you’re not detail-oriented, creating checklists can help ensure you don’t miss anything.
Partner with someone that has strengths to mitigate your weaknesses. This is the classic “two heads are better than one.”
Striking the Right Balance
Balancing your strengths and weaknesses is key. Overemphasizing strengths without addressing weaknesses can lead to blind spots, while focusing too much on weaknesses can erode confidence. Aim for a healthy balance where you’re leveraging your strengths while also continuously improving areas of weakness.
Action Plan for Your Strengths and Weaknesses
Understanding your strengths and weaknesses - your superhero abilities and kryptonite - requires ongoing assessment, reflection, and action. The steps for action are below, or you can utilize The Self-Awareness Workbook from Notes from the Field. Simply download this document, review the examples provided, and follow the path outlined to better identify, evaluate, and balance your strengths and weaknesses.
Step One: Initial Self-Assessment
Task: Reflect on personal experiences and list perceived strengths and weaknesses
Objective: Create a baseline understanding of self-perceived abilities and areas for improvement
Step Two: Gather External Feedback
Task: Request feedback from peers, friends, family, and mentors on your strengths and weaknesses
Objective: Gain diverse perspectives to understand how others perceive your abilities
Step Three: Analyze Feedback and Self-Assessment
Task: Compare and contrast self-assessments with the feedback received
Objective: Identify common themes and areas of agreement/discrepancy
Step Four: Develop and Implement Strategies to Improve Weaknesses
Task: For each weakness, develop a strategy for improvement (e.g., training, mentoring, practice)
Objective: Actively work on addressing weaknesses on a regular schedule
Step Five: Leverage and Enhance Strengths
Task: Identify opportunities to utilize and further develop your strengths (e.g., projects, new roles, additional responsibilities)
Objective: Maximize potential and contribution in areas of strength
Step Six: Regular Reflection and Journaling
Task: Maintain a regular journal documenting experiences, challenges, and progress related to strengths and weaknesses
Objective: Reflect on personal growth and adapt strategies as needed
Step Seven: Seek Professional Development Opportunities
Task: Enroll in workshops, courses, or seminars relevant to your identified areas for improvement or enhancement
Objective: Acquire new skills and knowledge to address strengths and weaknesses
Step Eight: Reassess and Adjust Goals
Task: Periodically reassess strengths and weaknesses and adjust goals accordingly
Objective: Ensure continuous personal and professional growth
Step Nine: Celebrate Progress and Successes
Task: Acknowledge and celebrate improvements and achievements in both strengths and weaknesses
Objective: Maintain motivation and recognize personal growth
More Resources on Your Strengths & Weaknesses
Want to dive deeper into this topic? We recommend:
Read
“The Greatness Mindset: Unlock the Power of Your Mind and Live Your Best Life Today” by Lewis Howes
The Greatness Mindset shows you how to unlock your strengths by clarifying who you are, discovering your mission, and stepping into how you can make an authentic, unique contribution to the world.
"Now, Discover Your Strengths" by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton
Based on Gallup's 40-year study of human strengths, this book introduces the concept of focusing on your strengths rather than weaknesses. It includes an online assessment to identify your top five strengths and provides strategies on how to use these strengths effectively. This book is especially useful for understanding how to capitalize on your natural talents.
"Mindset: The New Psychology of Success" by Carol S. Dweck
While not a direct guide to identifying strengths and weaknesses, Dweck's book is pivotal in understanding how our mindset influences our ability to grow and develop in various areas of our life. It distinguishes between a 'fixed' mindset and a 'growth' mindset, encouraging readers to adopt the latter in order to embrace challenges, learn from criticism, and develop their abilities and intelligence.
Listen
Maximize Your Strengths, Episode 99: Can Your Choose a Career With Your Strengths?
While a few years old, this episode highlights the work of Sarah Baker Andrus, a career counselor and professor at the University of Delaware, which helps her students find a great career fit that utilizes their strengths.
Take Action
The Self-Awareness Workbook by Notes from the Field
Ready to deepen your self-awareness? Engage with the modules outlined in the playbook to understand, develop, and track your own self-awareness.
The Self-Awareness Journal by Notes from the Field
Self-awareness is a continuous journey. Our weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual journal templates are available in Notion to deepen the connection and evolve your own self-awareness.
As your identify and reflect on your strengths, what themes resonate with you? Share with us in the comments.
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