Developing personal strengths is the key to long-term success in any career. Personal strengths provide job seekers with new opportunities and help individuals identify goals and passions while discovering new elements of their personality. Personal strengths also make life outside of work worth living by promoting both self-esteem and relationship satisfaction. Often, failure to develop core strengths results in a lack of motivation, a greater occurrence of burnout, and a drop in career goals. Productivity and positivity also suffer as a result, leading to negative impacts both in and outside of the workplace. To avoid these negative career and personal outcomes, developing your personal strengths is of utmost importance.
This article will guide you in identifying and furthering your existing strengths while focusing on the positive elements of developing skills. To kickstart this journey of self-discovery and growth, consider taking the HIGH5 strengths assessment. This scientifically-backed tool not only reveals your top five strengths but also provides personalized insights on how to leverage them effectively in your personal and professional life. By understanding your unique strengths profile through HIGH5, you’ll be better equipped to navigate the strategies and tips we’ll discuss in this article, making your strength development journey more targeted and impactful.
What are personal strengths?
Personal strengths are innate or learned skills or characteristics that help an individual flourish in their environment. While everyone possesses unique strengths, identifying them can sometimes be challenging. This is where tools like the HIGH5 strengths assessment become invaluable. By utilizing a comprehensive, research-based approach, HIGH5 helps individuals uncover their top five strengths, providing a solid foundation for personal and professional growth. Understanding your strengths through such a systematic method allows you to align your actions with your natural talents, leading to increased satisfaction and success in various aspects of life.
Strengths encompass a wide array of behaviors, thought patterns, and emotional sensitivities. Every individual has strengths that should be explored and understood for better application. While it may be tempting to think of personal development as a way of fixing what’s wrong with us, positive psychology is an approach to self-improvement that focuses less on our weaknesses and more on which of our traits is helping us the most. This strengths-based focus comes from the field of positive psychology, a psychological approach that focuses on human thriving [1]. The strengths-based practitioner behind positive psychology Martin Seligman, specified that strengths contribute to six specific virtues that help individuals live fulfilling lives [2]. Our strengths connect us further with each of these virtues, and each virtue has a set of strengths associated with it. These virtues and their connected strengths are [2]:
- Wisdom: creativity, curiosity, judgment, love of learning, perspective
- Courage: bravery, persistence, honesty, zest
- Humanity: love, kindness, social intelligence
- Justice: teamwork, fairness, leadership
- Temperance (Moderation): forgiveness, modesty, prudence, self-control
- Transcendence: appreciation of beauty, gratitude, hope, humor, spirituality
The strengths an individual possesses depend on their personality type, upbringing, career, and other circumstances in life.
4 examples of using personal strengths in careers
Virtually all careers can benefit from personal development skills, which allow you to grow, plan, and work toward your career goals. Below are 4 examples of ways to utilize strengths in select careers:
- Surgeons and most physicians must have strong teamwork skills, as they spend a large portion of their time working in groups. They must have stress management skills to overcome challenging situations, which involves the strengths of perspective, persistence, and self-control. Finally, they must demonstrate the strength of social intelligence when speaking to patients.
- Software engineers, who need technical skills like coding or cloud management, benefit from other strengths. Because they must be detail-oriented and independent, software engineers often have the strengths of creativity, love of learning, and zest.
- Business leaders must obtain strong leadership skills to guide a team toward success. Being a hard worker and trusting one’s intuition are also beneficial traits to leaders in this field. The strengths that help individuals succeed in business include hope, humor, leadership, and prudence.
- Customer service representatives must be able to communicate effectively and have strong social skills. They should be able to provide customers with support, even in stressful situations. Customer service strengths include kindness, honesty, fairness, and sometimes even forgiveness.
Pro Tip From HIGH5
When exploring your personal strengths, don’t just focus on the obvious ones. The HIGH5 assessment often reveals ‘hidden’ strengths that you might not have recognized. Pay special attention to these as they could be untapped resources for your personal and professional growth.
How to develop your character strengths?
To develop any strength, you must first identify the specific strengths you possess and those you’d like to enhance. The HIGH5 strengths assessment offers a comprehensive way to uncover your top five strengths, providing a clear starting point for your development journey. Once you’ve taken the assessment and understood your unique strengths profile, you can use the personalized insights provided to create a targeted development plan. This approach ensures that you’re not just randomly selecting strengths to work on but focusing on areas where you have natural potential for excellence. Once you do so, this general guideline may prove useful.
Personal and professional development suggestions based on target strengths
- Creativity: Try to find more than one possible solution to any problem. You also can practice activities that stimulate divergent thinking. One idea is to engage in daily free writing or journaling, where you allow your thoughts to flow without self-censorship.
- Curiosity: Go outside of your comfort zone by spending time with new people. Practice asking others thoughtful questions and active listening.
- Justice: Get involved in local, national, and global issues that are important to you. Speak with others who have a different opinion, and show them respect.
- Love of learning: Spend time researching ideas that fascinate you, or insert opportunities for microlearning into your day [3]. Read novels and watch documentaries that intrigue you.
- Leadership: Practice active listening to understand and motivate others, fostering stronger relationships and collaboration. Take initiative by stepping into leadership roles, even in small group settings, to build confidence and guide others effectively.
As you can see, these examples all show ways to intertwine strength development into your day-to-day life. Embracing a developing strength often looks different depending on the individual and the specific strength . However, personal strength development would generally involves finding ways to apply strengths to everyday activities and building from small successes to larger ones..
Pro Tip From HIGH5
Create a ‘Strength Development Plan’ based on your HIGH5 assessment results. For each of your top five strengths, set specific goals and identify daily activities that allow you to exercise these strengths. This consistent practice will help you develop your character strengths more effectively.
How to improve your personal strengths?
Focus on productivity, but do not overwhelm yourself
You already have inherent strengths, but you might be looking for innovative ways to apply and enhance them. This is where the HIGH5 strengths assessment can be particularly beneficial. By identifying your top five strengths, HIGH5 not only confirms what you excel at but also provides unique insights into how these strengths can be applied in various contexts. For instance, if ‘creativity’ is one of your top strengths, HIGH5 might suggest ways to incorporate creative problem-solving in your daily work routine, even in roles that might not traditionally be seen as ‘creative’.
Perhaps the worst action you could take for your personal development skills is to overwhelm yourself with improvement tasks and constantly dwell on your lack of progress. The goal of the strengths-based approach is to incorporate these strengths into your routine naturally and to focus on positive gains rather than losses. With a daily practice of finding small, new ways to utilize your strength for your benefit, you can avoid overwhelming yourself or overanalyzing your behavior.
Learn from experience
You can easily improve your strengths by examining your own experiences as well as others’. If you failed at meeting a goal, reflect on ways to apply your core strengths the next time you have a chance to work towards this goal. Also, look for the ways others adapt to challenging situations. Try out strategies that coworkers with similar strengths use. Most of the time, simply observing their behavior is enough to teach you how they apply their strengths, but you also can improve your relationship with a coworker by sharing your admiration for their effectiveness and asking them for their support in developing your own strengths.
Stay positive and motivated
Having a source of motivation can be extremely beneficial in strength development. Find an inspiring and honest reason why you would like to gain strength. Is it for career progression? Is it to help bring you closer to family or friends? Is it to improve a romantic relationship? Your motivation can be any reason, as long as it resonates with you and keeps you focused on your strength development.
Additionally, a positive attitude is a powerful motivator. There may be times when identifying your strengths is difficult, or applying soft skills can be complicated. Understand that this is part of the journey. In the end, you will be satisfied if you persevere through these moments instead of giving up. Positivity will also build up your persistence, and if you still need outside help, ask for support from your loved ones or a trusted professional.
Pro Tip From HIGH5
Use the ‘strength pairing’ technique. Look at your HIGH5 assessment results and experiment with combining two of your top strengths in a single task or project. This can lead to innovative approaches and accelerated personal growth.
Benefits of improving personal strengths
Communication
Strength development allows you to understand yourself better. Thus, you can set communicate more clearly with others about your boundaries. Additionally, gaining skills such as leadership helps you practice communicating effectively with your team. People who take the time to develop interpersonal strengths also understand their team better and can create seamless streams of communication so everyone remains on the same page.
Problem-Solving
Problem-solving strengths are beneficial to nearly all careers, and they allow individuals to flourish in a wide array of environments. When learning any skill, you will inevitably find problems with your initial approach and may have to adapt. When doing so, you are simultaneously learning the initial skill you set out to learn and practicing your problem-solving strengths.
Build self-awareness
When developing your strengths, you embark on a journey of self-discovery that reveals much more than just your abilities. You also discover your inner resilience, which gives you the opportunity to use your strengths to overcome limitations without and within. The HIGH5 strengths assessment facilitates this process by providing a comprehensive analysis of your top five strengths. This insight goes beyond simply listing your strengths; it offers a deep understanding of how these strengths shape your personality, influence your decision-making, and impact your interactions with others. By leveraging the HIGH5 assessment, you gain a powerful tool for self-awareness that can guide your personal and professional development in meaningful and targeted ways. By getting an inventory of your strengths, you will become aware of which abilities you have and how to utilize them to your advantage in your skill development journey.
Helps you understand other perspectives
Once you understand your own strengths, identifying other’s strengths and having empathy for their weaknesses becomes easier. As a result, you begin to empathize with those around you. Listening to others becomes more natural when you have the confidence that comes from personal strength development. This is because when you are secure in your own abilities, you do not seek outside validation. Rather, you can focus on understanding other perspectives.
Allows you to identify areas for improvement
Before you start analyzing your strengths and building skills, you may already have a rough idea of your weaknesses. However, your understanding of your weak points develops further once you begin reflecting and thinking analytically about your strengths and weaknesses. Understanding your strengths can also serve as a motivation to initiate improvements in your weaknesses.
Increase your positive vocabulary and positive self-talk
Positive self-talk has also been proven as a way to increase positive behavior [4]. When reflecting on your strengths, you have the opportunity to find new positive language to describe yourself. This applies to both writing about your strengths and the way you think about your abilities.
Greater appreciation for areas you may have previously undervalued
You may not fully understand the way your everyday behavior contributes to your strengths. By developing your personal strengths, you may come to discover that the habits that you find odd or negative may be contributing to your success. During strength analysis, you begin to understand which habits are productive and positive and which are negative. This comes through intentionally connecting your strengths and weaknesses to your behavior. The habits you previously judged negatively may turn out to be the key to your long-term success.
Pro Tip From HIGH5
Leverage your HIGH5 strengths profile in team settings. Share your top strengths with colleagues and learn about theirs. This mutual understanding can improve team dynamics, enhance collaboration, and help in assigning tasks that align with each team member’s strengths.
Improving personal strengths FAQ
How can I overcome weaknesses?
Overcoming weaknesses first starts with recognizing and accepting them. All humans have weaknesses, so you are not alone. Next, build a support system around you. It is beneficial for you to have someone providing you with advice on overcoming weaknesses. This can come from someone who has already overcome the flaw or someone who knows a lot about about the particular weakness in your focus.
How can I use my strengths to help others at work?
Make sure you are able to communicate well with the rest of your team of coworkers. Through clear two-way communication, you can receive valuable feedback from individuals, share your goals and concerns, and then lead them toward your shared objective. Motivate those around you by reminding them of the benefits you will all share when you reach your target. Then, you can use your leadership skills, analytical thinking, and empathy to benefit those around you.
How to enhance your strengths in life?
Firstly, identify your strengths. You can do this quickly and efficiently by taking the HIGH5 strengths assessment. This detailed analysis of your innate proficiencies will give you the perfect starting point for your journey of personal strength development. Then, with this information, look back on your successes and ask yourself: which of these skills or traits helped me achieve this? Once you understand how your strengths have already been working for you, seek new ways to apply them. This could mean going outside your comfort zone or using your beneficial traits in social situations with new employees or employers.
Conclusion
Personal strengths are necessary for every aspect of a career. They make up a part of your personality, contribute to your motivation and passion, and play an important role in your relationships both in and outside of the workplace. When you decide to improve your skills or develop new abilities, you choose to improve yourself as a person. Investing in yourself this way will not only make you a more efficient employee and more appealing to employers, but it also allows you to be more successful and satisfied in your day-to-day life.
References:
- Ackerman, C. (2018). What is positive psychology & why is it important?. Positive Psychology. https://positivepsychology.com/what-is-positive-psychology-definition/.
- Al Taher, R. (2016). The classification of character strengths and virtues. Positive Psychology. https://positivepsychology.com/classification-character-strengths-virtues/.
- Baer, S. (2020). Microlearning: The future of professional development. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbeshumanresourcescouncil/2020/03/19/microlearning-the-future-of-professional-development/.
- Mead, E. (2019). What is positive self-talk? (Incl. examples). Positive Psychology. https://positivepsychology.com/positive-self-talk/.
