Know your Strengths and Weaknesses: It takes Courage to Know and Put an Identity on Yourself. Do you have the Gut?

According to Peter Drunker, most Americans do not know what their strengths are. When you ask them, they look at you with a blank stare, or they respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer.

Unfortunately, most of us have little knowledge of our talents and strengths and opportunities and threats around us. Without the knowledge, we are unable to live our lives to its fullest potential. Discovering yourself better, and know your strengths and weaknesses are key to success. The knowledge leads to the understanding of what you define as success in life, what you want and how do you want to live your life.

Everyone is different, and if you don’t know yourself well, and know your strengths and weaknesses well, you can either be dragged around like a cow, living under others’ expectation, and not living the life you want to live!

Or you could hold an imbalance perspective of life and become expert in our weaknesses and spend our entire life trying to repair the flaws. Either way, this is not the life that we are trying to live.

Why is it important to know your strengths and weaknesses?
1) Defending against enemy: Because if you don’t know yourself well, even if you have the knowledge of your enemy, you can’t best use it to your advantage. You have no idea if you have advantages over the enemy!
2) Coaching others: If you don’t know yourself well, you can’t lead or coach others. You can’t reach out the best in others, if you are not in the best yourself.
3) And most importantly, without knowing your strengths and weakness, you can achieve personal leadership. You basically don’t have a good knowledge of who you are, what you want to achieve in life, and what you considered a good life. You will be chasing after winds (whatever is popular or whatever the major crowds think). It can be quite a frustrating life!!

Important to know that even though we agree that know your strengths and weaknesses are important, we disagree on the concept of focusing on improving your weaknesses only. We are the believer of everyone is unique, and all of us have strengths and weaknesses which uniquely make us – US!! Therefore, we believe to achieve our fullest potential, focus on the strengths rather than weaknesses.

However, knowing your strengths and weaknesses is fundamental and an important exercise. You need to know what your key strengths are and what is your pitfall? Knowing your pitfall is crucial, because this is the very few weaknesses you need to aware and correct/develop so that it doesn’t become a major stopper to your goals.

For the rest of the weaknesses, you need to be aware of them, and work around your weaknesses. You can surround yourself with people or other resources which help to fill the gap of your weaknesses. In other word, leverage other to fill the gap. Example, you are not a detailed-oriented person and spending time working on budget spreadsheets and accounting is tough on you.

Although you need to have some basic finance knowledge, you don’t need to make yourself suffer and work on the spreadsheet yourself. You can either hire a person to do for you, or use available tools including those online to help you to do budgeting. You can make a better use of your limited time and resources.

However, do not mistaken weaknesses with major pitfall. If you have a pitfall which can hinder from achieving your goal or a stumbling block to you, you need to correct it. Example, you want to become a CEO, or senior management in a company, but your communication and articulation skill is at the basic level (meaning the message you want to deliver doesn’t get across well to recipient), that could be a stumbling block to your career goal, and you need to work on it if you want to be successful and achieve your goal. Understand the opportunities available and threats around you will help you to excel further into your personal life and career.

Therefore, in identifying weaknesses, it is important for you to recognize those which can be damaging and disasters to your career.

Now that we understand the importance to know your strengths and weaknesses and the fundamental concepts of focusing and developing on your strengths, know your pitfall, and managing around your weaknesses, you are set to go!



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