Identifying Your Strengths

Domain: Personal Growth - Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

When working on our development for personal or professional growth, many of us focus on what we consider to be our perceived weaknesses.

That's often an uphill battle with questionable returns.

The truth is motivation comes easier when you focus on what you enjoy and are already good at. Thankfully, we tend to already enjoy the things we are good at. Additionally, working on strengths usually results in positive feedback (since you're already good at the skill), which further adds to motivation. This builds our confidence which makes us more willing to experiment and take calculated risks to further enhance our abilities.

There's a lot to cover on the topic of strength-based development (including when not to do it). Today, we'll provide a few tips for the first step…identifying your strengths.

Self-reflect

The first tip is the most straight-forward. Simply sit down and list your major contributions and achievements over the past few years. Don't just rush through them, but really take the time to think of achievements big and small. Also, be sure to pull from both your personal and professional life. You want as large and diverse a list as possible.

Once you've done that, what common themes do you notice? Do you see trends that rely on certain skills or abilities showing-up time and time again? Those skills are great candidates for strengths that you can continue to develop.

Ask around

Consider asking trusted friends, family members and colleagues to share what they believe to be your strengths and top talents. An outside perspective is sometimes helpful in highlighting the skills that we take for granted.

In this category, you can also include those abilities that you have frequently been complimented on or received positive feedback for. I still recommend asking those closest to you, but another data-point about historical feedback doesn’t hurt.

Once again, we're looking for trends and common themes from this list that help your natural strengths stand out.

Self-assess

Some people have trouble identifying strengths through self-guided reflection. Luckily, there is no shortage of assessments that you can take online to identify skills, strengths and tendencies.

Some of these measure slightly different things (strengths, communication style, personality, etc.) but none of them should be used to fully define who you are or what you're capable of. Instead, use these results as simply one data point for your ongoing self-reflection. That leads us to…

Combine it

If you really struggle with identifying your strengths, consider a combination of the three approaches above. This can be helpful for providing you with a higher degree of confidence in your identified strengths.

For instance, say you have self-identified a strength that you have also received positive feedback on and/or it shows-up in self-assessments. There's a good chance that you truly do excel at that skill. Use the additional data points as reassurance of that fact if you find yourself unsure.

Thank you for reading. My hope is always that you've found something helpful and easy to implement. If you have feedback, suggestions or questions, please email them to [email protected] 

This week’s action items:

1. Take the time to create a thorough list of all your accomplishments over the last few years.

2. Ask trusted family, friends and co-workers on what they feel your strengths are.

3. Consider any feedback or compliments you’ve previously received around your abilities.

4. Explore the various assessments available for identifying skills and behavioral tendencies.

5. Note any trends or themes that stand out among whichever approaches you explored in order to identify your top strengths.