When you think about improving yourself, do you associate that with your positive or your negative qualities? Do you think about building on your strengths or working on your weaknesses?
When we think about improvement, most of us come up with ways to improve our weaknesses. We are constantly trying to fix things, instead of becoming really great at the things we are already good at.
Since school, we have learned to focus on fixing our grades, instead of focusing on the things that we are already good at. If you fail at math, you should take additional classes and work extra just to catch up with the other kids. And if you are naturally good in Literature, well okay, fine - don't focus much on that.
And when we fail at school, we get low self-esteem. If your friend is very good at math and you are not, you feel stupid. You are constantly reminded that you failed and you should try harder. Well, maybe that is not who you are. You are surely very talented in another field and when you put your efforts there, you will thrive!
The things don't change when you grow older and choose a career path.
Let's say, you decide to become a salesman. And you nail it, you just rock. You close sales more than any other in your department. You are happy and successful.
You become the best salesman in the company in no time and eventually you decide to become a Sales Manager. That's a step above, right? It should be a right choice.
You think you can become the best sales manager, if you put enough effort. You read books on management, try to find the best role models, start working twice as much. You stay late every night trying to get the job done - sometimes even at the expense on your family and health.
But...
Eventually, you become better, but not the best. You just can't organize and plan accordingly, and the people are always delaying and the stress is too much to bare. You feel terrible at your workplace. You start hating your colleagues, treat everyone poorly and you feel tired all the time. You just hate your job. You feel, that if you stayed at your previous position as a salesman, you would have been happier.
Is it all just waste of time? Maybe.
There are different types of people, who are good at different things. In order to be happy and to unleash your full potential, you have to find and analyze your strengths and weaknesses. If you know what you are good at, you can start building on that. You can become better and better. And most importantly, you will enjoy doing it, because you will succeed in it.
So what stands in our way to happiness and success?
The thing is, that we all embraced the maxim:
"You can be anything you want to be, if you just try hard enough."Sure, it's a good motivation quote and sure, you will become better when practicing. But many of us believed in that a little bit too much.
Of course you CAN be anything you want to be, but how good can you get, if you are just not the type of person for that? Will you be able to unleash your potential with something that is not built on your strengths?
Let's say you are very good at managing people and work on that, you can decide to become a manager. Then, you can hire the best types of people for the specific things you want them to do. Need an accountant - hire one. We all know that no matter how smart you are, you cannot be good at everything and try do to it all by yourself. If you are good at something - just that one thing - like managing people, you will be able to motivate and manage them and they will work together, combining their strengths.
So do you think it is more important to focus on weaknesses or on strengths and why? Write in the comments below.
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@ivanovzlatan
I think both, we need to know one in order to evaluate the other.
Absolutely agree!
PS: It is very interesting that talking about evaluating both got me thinking about the SWOT analysis in a business environment. Many tutors teach it that one should focus on identifying the strengths and weaknesses and later converting the weaknesses to opportunities, which follows the model "Improve your weaknesses" and not "Make your strengths even better".
Thank you for the contribution @themevlog :)
welcome
Hey, I completely follow your thought. First think of how you define the word "Strengths". It is not necesserily something specific like "I can sell" or "I am good at coding". You can also think of it as your personal qualities and character. There is a lot of information in the internet about how to find your own strengths such as books, psychological tests and articles. I can recommend you the following:
After you get to know yourself a bit more, you can think of what things got you excited when you were a kid. And then where can you realize your personal qualities and passions.
I hope it helps you at least a bit!
Best,
@ivanovzlatan
You are welcome, I am ENFP, a.k.a the Campaigner. :)