How To Know Your Strength and Weakness: Knowing your strength and weakness is more just like knowing your real self. Therefore, knowing who you are extends to the fact that you know what your strengths and weaknesses are. Knowing your strength and weakness implies understanding the areas you can easily perform better as compared to other areas. Similarly, your weakness tell you that you need to be prepared to overcome challenges and fight a bit extra in order to overcome the challenge in those area where you are weak. Every living being has some strength and some weaknesses.
Your strengths and weaknesses could be your inherent attributes. It can as well be those external factors that could interflow with your inherent attributes to form part of your personality. Your strengths could be comprised of your soft and hard skills such as adaptability, problem solving skill, integrity, steadfastness, commitment, creativity, procrastination, allergies, distractions, etc. What is necessary is to determine which one to focus on and how to tame its powers to make it profitable to your objective. Self-awareness is essential for one’s growth and attainment of desired heights of success. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses places you on an advantaged position which not only empowers you but propels you forward on your chosen path.
The awareness and consciousness of your weaknesses which are your flaws, shortcomings and limitations helps you navigate your way around them and also allows you to work on them in such a way that they begin to propel in your favour. Weaknesses are viewed as temporary because one can always improve on the weak areas or make some necessary adjustment.
Weaknesses therefore do not become permanent unless we give them the permission to become so. Understanding the role which your strength and weakness play in your personal development is that which gives you charge over them to be transformed into your favour. While you are required to work on building strong the weaknesses, you are also required to reinforce your strengths. The limits of one’s strength can only b observed when one is self aware of the strength, and on the other hand also, improvement can only be made on one’s weakness when he is aware of them. The center point therefore seems to be self awareness.
Strength implies capability and positive attributes which are attributable and favourable to a person. Weakness implies defect, flaw, vulnerability and qualities which are inadequate and as such, may pose as a limitation to a person’s potential.
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8 Tips On How to Identify Your Strengths And Weaknesses
Below are tips on how to know your strength and weakness:
1. Self Introspection: knowing one’s strengths and weaknesses does not come on a platter of gold. It takes time and conscious efforts. Engaging in self reflection demands a lot of energy. Self introspection is the act of specifically looking inward. It is the cognitive act or process of self – examination, or inspection of one’s thoughts and feelings. This is also referred to as self – consciousness or self awareness. This is considered the first and the most important step to take in a move to discovering your strength and weakness.
Self introspection may be conducted for various purposes, but for this very purpose, the focus should be on discovering the attributes which one possesses that works to his advantage, and discovering the flaws and how they probably jeopardize or render more difficult the person’s personal growth and development. For your strengths, find out the areas which you are naturally good at.
Conducting this cognitive exercise of self introspection makes one powerful and confident, since you would become informed on your true self and capacity. Conduct the self introspection exercise; discover and take note of your attributes that works to your advantage with ease, the things you are capable of doing with ease, and then those that pose as a challenge to you.
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2. Consider your passion: your passions are those areas that exceptionally interest you without compulsion but merely by their innate attribute. Your strengths and weaknesses do not only relate to your personal attributes but also extends to the external factors which are more favourable to you. When an area is such that is your interest, you would see that you are clothed with passion towards it. You are most likely to propel better in such areas; those are your strengths.
Naturally, passion drives you to where your strengths are. In discovering your strengths and weaknesses therefore, you should consider your areas of interest; otherwise you may have a difficult time evaluating the true state of what constitutes your strengths and weaknesses. Your passions are your natural place of calling. Your hobbies are also considered your passionate areas. They are your ideal potentials.
3. Ask people: Another way to know your strength and weakness is to ask the people around you. This should be directed to the people that are close to you whom you trust. The people around you do observe you and knows your capacity to a very large extent. They can help you figure out your strengths and weaknesses.
They know where you could fit into; your possible strengths and weaknesses. You can alternatively engage the services of a professional to help you discover your strength and weakness. The professional should also be a trusted one. It could be a psychologist or other trained and experienced personnel.
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4. Pay attention to feedback: Paying attention to feedback means to pay attention on results. It is the act of critically assessing and evaluating the result of processes or activities. When you have enquired from people, you should evaluate their response and try to reconcile them with the result of your self – introspection exercise.
Consider the areas where people have complimented you one. Also when you make efforts; when you explore certain areas, you should evaluate the progress, the outcome and the impact made so far. Do have a reflections on your findings whichever means through which it was made. Once you received all the results, the next thing is to look out for commonalities. These are the things that are similar in the various results.
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5. Reflect on your Values: sometimes it can be difficult to identify our strengths and weaknesses because we have not taken time to ascertain our core values. values in this context are those beliefs that are attributable to a person. These values ate core dictates to a person’s view about life.
In discovering your strengths and weaknesses, it is necessary to reflect o your values and on the possible ways by which they will affect your strength and weaknesses. This will enable you position you life in such a manner that does not conflict with your values and possible strengths.
6. Take personality tests: personality tests are psychology related instruments used for personal assessment. This is usually done by way of attempting questionnaires. This is more like a self introspection exercise but it is usually systematized.
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7. Know your background, especially what your parents are good at: If possible you can ask them to get clarity. Ask them to give you some moments of their time no matter how busy they are to tell you what they are good at, what they love doing and what they have flair for. They may not be practicing that thing because not everyone has the opportunity to do what they have aptitude for so make sure not to ask them about what they are doing. If what they are doing is what they have flair for and what they like doing then that’s a massive addition.
A good addition to this would be to know what your grandparents were doing. Ask them about what their parents were also doing. Since they are both your parents, a reincarnation of you, you will sooner or later see yourself doing those things. If you know what they were doing and then you see yourself good at those things you know that is part of your strength.
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8. Try new things: There is a saying that says you won’t know till you try. So the key to doing things is to try. There are a lot of things that you don’t know that you have inside you until you actually push yourself to doing them. One good thing about trying out strengths is that for instance, how would you know if you have a writing ability if you never tried to write first?
If you push yourself to do things you’ve never done before you may discover a wonderful ability you never had. One reason why people don’t do things, anyway, is fear. So go learn those things on free platfoms: there’s google, there’s YouTube, there are free courses and seminars that you could use to learn this or that. Still feeling scared? Then ask someone already in the field to teach you some things about the craft.
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Conclusions
If only life came with a guidance manual then things would have been easier, but sadly that’s not the case. However, I hope that with the above points of mine I have convinced and not confused you about the proper methods to go about discovering your strengths and weaknesses. See you in the next article.
Edeh Samuel Chukwuemeka, ACMC, is a lawyer and a certified mediator/conciliator in Nigeria. He is also a developer with knowledge in various programming languages. Samuel is determined to leverage his skills in technology, SEO, and legal practice to revolutionize the legal profession worldwide by creating web and mobile applications that simplify legal research. Sam is also passionate about educating and providing valuable information to people.