Why You Should Know Your Strengths

Why should you know your strengths

 Knowing your strengths and what makes you special can be difficult to admit for some people because they can tend to think of it as bragging and most of us weren’t raised this way.  Also, many of us don’t even know what our strengths and weaknesses are.  Somehow we have become quite good at not leveraging our strengths in order to continue to fit in with the herd in general.  Everyone knows how impossible it is for any human to be good enough to satisfy everyone around them. There will always people who don’t like you not matter what, that’s just a fact of life.  However, you shouldn’t let this be the reason why you will limit yourself to certain things while there are other things you can do to excel. As far as strength awareness is concerned, there are certain reasons why it is important to know what your strengths are as well as the qualities you possess which makes you the unique being that you are.

Importance of Strength Awareness

 1.  Know and accept yourself

It is important for you to know yourself and to accept yourself for who you are. There are a lot of people who fail to recognizes that the unique qualities they possess can also be their strengths and underestimate the values if these characteristics. It is also very easy for some people to actively hide or dismiss these qualities as a result of not knowing how valuable these make them. This could be because at a particular time in our life, we have been discriminated, criticized by some people who thinks that part of us is unacceptable. The moment you accept and develop what makes you different from others, you have taken the first step towards strength awareness.

Self-acceptance is so key to living a positive and engaged life in general.  Taking the step of knowing your strengths and weaknesses will benefit you greatly.

2.  Stay Motivated and Energized

Doing what you love and enjoying it fills you up with a kind of inner peace, energy, enthusiasm and sense of accomplishment. This is because by using your strength, you become aligned with your purpose as you make use of your unique talents. When you do something out of compulsion rather than will, you tend to be slow and somehow start to procrastinate such activity. This is not a way to excuse you from doing other tasks that are outside the scope of your strength but rather a way to make us recognize the reason why we are often demotivated to do some tasks and so motivated and energized to do some. In short, strength awareness helps in creating more energy and motivation.

3.  Drop the need to be the best in everything

The truth is; no one can be good or be the best in everything but we can find a way to excel in certain things. Focusing on what we know we naturally do well and also developing those skills help us to release a certain pressure to excel in all areas. It is important that we stop comparing ourselves to others and also let go of the need to be like anyone else so as to free us to develop our own unique abilities. Embrace your strength and let go of the feeling of wanting to be the best at everything.

4.  Recognize your Partnerships

From the moment you accept that you cannot be the best at everything and commit to finding ways to develop your natural abilities, you are closer to achieving your goals. You may not like the idea of accepting that you need someone, but you need to remember how important it is to have successful partnerships in various areas of your life. The truth is; you may struggle hard as an individual and still not achieve the goal, but as a team, it is hard not to eventually succeed. Strength awareness helps you to become clear about the characteristics that you need to balance in order to produce the bet results both at work and at home.

 

5.  Manage your Strengths

It is one thing for you to know what your strengths are and it is another thing for you to know how to use them to be able to bring the results you are looking for. Managing yourself is about finding ways to modulate your strengths so that they can serve you effectively and without strength awareness we are bound to neglect establishing certain boundaries leading us into some challenging situations where we override others. Every strength comes with both negative and positive sides in such a way that it serves us and does not serve us. You have to find a way to know what your strengths look like when they are outside healthy boundaries and also know how to restore balance when this happens. The ability to effectively manage our strengths increases as we become more aware of them.

Awareness Is Key

Strength awareness is the key to recognizing how unique and special you are, how important you are to the world and those around you, and how effective your impact is everywhere you go. By recognizing what your strengths are, you are able to take full control of what happens and how it happens, how you succeed and how far you go. It is essentially important for everyone to be able to confidently answer what both their strengths and weaknesses are. We must be very careful not to let our strengths become our weakness because sometimes overconfidence in our strength can be the beginning of some unavoidable disasters just as much as it can be the beginning of an unending success.

I’ll Go First

My strengths:  I am great communicator and can paint a clear picture for others.  I can’t tell you how many times someone will thank me deeply because I explained something to them in a manner that is simple, clear, and concise.  I am wonderful at relationship building and finding unique answers to problems.  I am highly resilient and persistent.  I don’t give up easy, sometimes to a fault.  I can crank out lots of “to do” things in a day.

My weaknesses:  As I tell my wife to her ongoing frustration, quality is not job #1 for me.  I am happy getting things done quickly so I can check it off my list and it’s not always done with an eye to detail.  To me many things are “good enough”.  I am very impatient and can be a bit of a control freak.  I can’t get too deep into the weeds on details, I lose interest.

Know what your strengths are, accept yourself for who you are, and utilize your strengths to your advantage.

What are your strengths?

 

All my best,

Mat A.