What are your strengths?
Blog post description.
Have you ever been asked, "What are your strengths?" Most people either give a generic answer like "hardworking" or "team player," or they struggle to answer altogether. What's surprising is that many capable and experienced professionals are also not able to articulate their strengths or probably sometimes not able to spot their strengths. And when you don't know your strengths or you are not able to articulate your strengths, you risk underutilizing your potential, choosing the wrong opportunities, and overlooking the value you can create.
Thus, not being prepared to answer the question what are your strengths satisfactorly, may result in a missed opportunity to create the desired impact or impression.
Being corporate professional we are used to make fancy SWOT analysis slides for our organisation however, we hardly spend any quality time developing one for ourselves. I honestly feel that at least we should clearly know our strengths if not SWOT analysis. Generally, we are too busy with our routine work and never pay attention to this crucial aspect.
Today, I want to share why giving careful thought to our strengths is important and how we can identify and articulate our strengths. Let’s begin with, why knowing our strengths matter?
Our strengths are more than the things we are good at. They are qualities, capabilities, and behaviours that consistently help us create value and achieve results. When we have clarity about our strengths, we make better career decisions, we gain confidence in challenging situations, and we communicate our value more effectively.
How to identify our strengths – Five pointers of strengths:
There are many ways one can look at individual’s strength, based on my experience I consider five basic types of strengths;
• Character strengths such as integrity, resilience, honesty, truthfulness, and accountability.
• Professional and Technical strength – education, qualification, relevant experience, etc
• Cognitive strengths is ability to grasp and process the information such as analytical thinking, creativity, and strategic thinking.
• People strengths such as communication, influencing, team-work, collaboration, listening etc
• Emotional and Physical strength: ability to deal with unfavorable situations and people as well as ability to sustain higher efforts
Five questions mentioned below help us qualify our strengths.
• First, what have I consistently done well over the years? (Better performance)
• Second, what do others like about me? What they regularly appreciate about me? (Likability)
• Third, what activities energize me while also producing strong results? (Positivity & enjoyment)
• Forth, what do I really feel confident about? Confidence
• Fifth, what is that differentiates me from others? - Differentiation
How to Articulate our Strengths
We need to articulate the strengths by linking it to the value it adds to others or to the organisation. Example, our strength may be problem-solving skills.
The way we can articulate it is “I enjoy deep diving into problems and come up with practical and efficient solutions that are able to make measurable difference in the performance outcomes”. Then, if needed, we may quickly give an example to support.
A well-articulated strength connects the strength with our behaviour and the value that we add. The real advantage comes from using them deliberately.
How to leverage our strengths: To leverage our strengths we need to ask ourselves;
Am I spending enough time using my strengths?
Which responsibilities allow me to apply them more frequently?
How can I use these strengths to solve bigger problems?
Leveraging our strengths effectively is very crucial for our success because success rarely comes from fixing our weaknesses, rather it often comes from maximising our strengths while managing our limitations.
Take away:
Well, my takeaway from this discussion is;
• It is worth spending quality time in knowing, identifying and articulating our strengths for our personal and professional growth
• There are five different types of strengths we can look at such as character strengths, professional & technical strengths, cognitive strengths, people strengths and finally emotional and physical strength
• There are five qualifying factors we can use to ascertain the strengths we identify, such as – consistently better performance, likability, enjoyment & positivity, confidence, differentiation
• Merely, identifying strengths is not enough but we should be able to articulate it, stating a clear value that we create through our strengths.
• Finally, we need to learn to leverage our strengths because remember , success rarely comes from fixing weaknesses but it comes from leveraging strengths.
What are your thoughts about the how do we identify, articulate and leverage our strengths?
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