Grow Strengths Forget Weakness

 

Focus on Strengths and not weaknesses. This might seem counterintuitive, but it’s a true path to success.  Many people dwell on their weaknesses and this is a road to ruin.  You might think that you need to continually work to fix what’s broken, to improve your performance in these areas.  Let’s look at that. 

Everyone has strengths and weaknesses.  Strengths and talents are things about yourself that are part of you because of how you were born and your life experiences. You can’t make something a talent. On the talent show, American Idol, there are dozens of folks that desperately want to be on the show. They’ve worked hard for years to improve their singing talent and they’re ready with the perfect song. They open their mouths to sing and... they’re terrible.  They can’t carry a tune at all.  Watching from your couch at home, even you feel embarrassed for them.  It didn’t matter how many years they worked, how hard they practiced or what song they picked.  They simply can’t sing. They don’t have the talent for it and no amount of hard work was going to turn it into a strength.   

The same thing applies to your weaknesses.  No matter how hard you work, you’ll never turn it into a strength.  With weaknesses, you don’t want to focus on them so much that you fail to identify and hone your strengths.  If you focus too much on your weaknesses, you can become overwhelmed with defeat. While we say don’t focus on your weaknesses, we don’t mean ignore them completely.  It's important to understand what your weaknesses are and device a way to use your strengths to compensate for them. The woodworker that isn’t a talented designer but is talented at the craft of milling lumber and joining it together might become discouraged if they focused only on trying to become a better designer.  If they instead focused on using other’s designs and plans to build beautiful things, they could build their business to success much quicker by producing phenomenal furniture that’s built better than everyone else's work. 

Many managers have their teams focus on their weaknesses and build elaborate plans on how to fix them. Every meeting is around how to fix this weakness or that weakness.  They employee tries as they might to fix everything that’s “wrong” with them, but they can’t.  Their weaknesses are part of who they are.  The manager becomes frustrated that they’re not seeing an improvement in performance.  The employee becomes demoralized because they can’t seem to life up to their manager’s expectations and are constantly focused on what’s wrong with them. 

Managers should instead focus on their team's strengths and talents.  They’re good at these things by nature and they derive great pleasure from doing them.  Good managers also assign work based on the talents of their teams.  An employee with a high degree of talent in analyzing data, should work on understanding data and what it means.  The employee with a talent for strategic thinking should be assigned to work with the analyst to understand what’s going on and how to build a strategy to move the business forward.   

Focus on your strengths and talents. It will lead to greater success in your professional and personal life. Use your strengths to work around your weaknesses.  Your peers, supervisors and team will notice the change in you and appreciate it.  You’ll appear more relaxed, happier and authentic.  That is a key to being well respected and getting ahead in life. 

Having trouble finding your strengths and talents?  Start a conversation below.  We want to hear all about it!