Developing your personal strengths not only serves as a way to improve your performance, but it also helps you learn more about yourself as a person.
Personal strength varies from individual to individual, but one aspect remains constant: strengths benefit you in every industry and almost any situation.
The trouble comes with unlocking your mental strength, which can be complex and difficult to achieve on your own. It takes patience, strategic planning, and self care that you put in every day at work and at home.
However, there are certainly ways to identify strengths that simply the process. This article will explore ways to develop personal and professional strengths and the top ways to utilize them.
What are Personal Strengths?
Personal strengths are skills or personality traits that benefit an individual throughout their life, whether it be in private relationships or formal settings like work.
All people have strengths, but they often go unused. When this occurs, you miss out on an opportunity to succeed. Strengths allow individuals to be more efficient, productive, empathetic, artistic, or so on.
They bring out the best qualities in us. So, they allow us to achieve more and become more satisfied. If you choose not to use your strengths, your career and personal life suffer in a multitude of ways.
If you have a professional strength like communication and it is not utilized, your team can become confused and chaotic. Remember that strengths reach beyond the workplace. At home, your relationship may suffer.
Emotional stability is crucial to maintain a healthy relationship with a romantic partner, and the dissatisfaction you feel from understanding your unfulfilled potential could cause emotional issues.
Without putting the emphasis on strengths, weakness can also overcome you. Take public speaking: you are told to present a project to a group.
However, you did not work to your full potential since your skills were not utilized correctly. So, fearing embarrassment, you become nervous and panic.
Here, your weakness or lack of emotional control is shown. This would not have occurred if you used all of your strengths during the project.
7 Ways How to Identify Your Personal Strengths
Yes, figuring out your strengths on your own can be a bit complicated. However, the following list of strengths provides you with a few tips to make identifying your strong points easier.
1. Take the Strengths Test
It could not get any easier than this: simply take a strengths test, and the results will be provided to you.
However, what truly matters is how you interpret the results and what you choose to do with them.
Implement your core strengths that appear in the report to your everyday life. Find new ways to use them even in moments of turmoil.
2. Talk With Your Relatives and Coworkers & Write Down What They Say
Speaking to others, especially individuals you love and trust, can be truly helpful when trying to see your own personal strength.
Ask them about major moments in your life and analyze which strengths help you overcome challenges as a group. Write down what they say to not forget any major points.
Keep in mind that they will likely tell you about your external strengths which are more visible to them.
Your internal strengths, which help you overcome internal/personal issues, can be better identified by you.
3. Identify and Acknowledge Your Personal Weaknesses
It sounds counterintuitive: how does searching for weaknesses help me find about about strengths?
By understanding weaknesses, you can find ways that you overcome them with certain tactics.
Ask yourself which personality traits help you overcome your weaknesses.
4. Find Where You are Productive
During your day, pay attention to when you are most productive. When using your strengths, you will feel like time is passing quickly.
This is because we generally enjoy using our strengths. Consider creating a list of times where your productivity soars, and relate the activities done during that time to your key strengths.
5. Understand Your Passions
If you enjoy a task, strength development in that sphere will not feel like work.
When doing your favorite activities, see which cognitive abilities or physical strengths you use. Even if you are not great at this activity yet, you can improve.
Strength improvement is easier when you enjoy the activity you perform.
6. Go Outside Your Comfort Zone
You must become self-aware to find your strengths.
To do this, try new activities, skills, or hobbies. When a project deals with strengths outside of your skillset, take a risk and contribute.
Seek out new leadership roles, shadow mentors, or take classes in a specific strength you would like to develop.
7. Create a Support Network
People you surround yourself with influence your personality factors, attitude, outlook in life, and strengths.
They should bring out the best in you and have a positive attitude toward life. Choose to surround yourself with those who have different kinds of strengths, but who are all supportive.
They should truly root for you when you succeed and help you when you are feeling down.
How to Utilize and Leverage Your Personal Strengths
If you value performing well in your job or having a fulfilling life, consider investing in yourself.
Start by defining your strengths, either by taking an assessment, asking your coworkers, or looking back on your prior successes. Once you do this, start setting goals.
Make them specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. Over the course of a month, see if you have made any improvements in achieving your goals.
Remember to incorporate ways your strengths can help you accomplish the goal. At work, use your strengths as much as you can.
Pay attention to where, when, and why you use your skills and which behaviors help your strengths become evident.
Think about how both hard and soft skills help you excel at work, and when they truly shine so you can understand which behaviors are most conducive to leveraging your strengths.
Establish new healthy and productive behaviors that allow your strengths to shine. Choose to replace some of your bad habits with strength-enhancing activities.
For example, instead of watching TV alone after work, consider socializing with like-minded professionals. This will build your confidence and social intelligence. Or, you can read books as an alternate activity.
List with Examples of Personal Strengths
Now that you know how to develop skills and why doing so is important, you may be wondering which particular strengths you should focus on.
The following list consists of many examples of strengths that are beneficial across nearly all industries.
Personal Strengths Examples
- Action-oriented
- Attentive
- Collaborative
- Creative
- Committed
- Determined
- Flexible
- Enthusiastic
- Empathetic
- Disciplined
- Honest
- Respectful
- Patient
- Innovative
- Trustworthiness
- Respectfulness
- Patience
What are Personal Weaknesses?
Personal weaknesses are traits that prevent you from excelling in your relationships or stifle your ability to use your strengths.
All individuals have weaknesses and ignoring them does not allow you to address the problems properly.
At times, weaknesses can simply be a lack of a crucial strength. For example, if you lack confidence, this can be viewed as a weakness as it stops you from taking control, believing in yourself, taking calculated risks, etc.
Other examples of personal weaknesses include being passive, aggressive, lazy, impatient, impulsive, greedy, or overly emotional (lack of emotional intelligence can contribute to this).
The severity of weaknesses depends on the individual and the industry/company they work in. If you lack a necessary skill, the pressure to gain that strength is immense and time-bound.
However, most people want to improve their weaknesses for personal growth and career development, not because it will make or break their life.
It is better to focus on developing strengths while accepting and building up weaknesses on the side, rather than dwelling on your imperfections.
How to Enhance Personal Weaknesses into Personal Strengths
You must begin by acknowledging and accepting the weaknesses. Being self-aware is a crucial part of self-development.
Without self-awareness, understand how far you have come since beginning your journey is challenging. Have some guide you along the way.
Make sure that those around you are not a negative influence, since some individuals may choose to suppress your strengths and foster your weaknesses.
Have a discussion about strengths with someone you trust to see if they have ways to let your key strengths shine at work and in your relationship with them.
Also, reflect back on times when you overcame challenges with your strengths. See which weaknesses made achieving a goal difficult.
Then ways to use that weak point along with your strengths to make developing a new strength from a weakness easier.
Frequently Asked Questions About Identifying Personal Strengths
How do you utilize your strengths?
Sometimes, even when you’ve already identified your strengths, you find it hard to make use of them. In order to utilize your strengths, you need to find activities that will allow you to demonstrate your powers and abilities.
For instance, if creativity is your strength but your work doesn’t require anything except for organizational work, try freelancing and engage in fields such as graphic design or copywriting. Or offer your managers some help and tell them you’re interested in performing more creative tasks.
How do you identify your personal strengths and weaknesses?
If you’re looking for ways to identify your personal strengths and weaknesses, all you have to do is ask for feedback. Whether we like it or not, we often tend to be subjective when it comes to our own qualities.
But if you reach out to receive feedback, you’ll see what others think and what your true strengths and weaknesses really are. So, listen to what others compliment you on and pay attention to skills they advise you to improve.
