Why You should Work on Strengths, Not Weaknesses

No doubt, throughout your life you were taught to work on your weaknesses, to try to improve your skills and abilities in areas where you did not thrive. Hands down, that may be the biggest lie we’ve ever been told. At the end of the day, all this does is rob you of your confidence. This belief may sound crazy when you first read it, since from a young age onward, you’ve probably been told, “You’re not good at calculus, so go do more calculus. You’re not good at history, go study more history”. By focusing on your weaknesses, though, you end up feeling inferior subconsciously. Just as troubling, this focus time encourages you to ignore your exceptional capabilities and strengths.

This misconception about improving weaknesses is practiced by many people, including educators, parents, managers, and other authority figures. It’s a well-intentioned but misplaced idea that almost held us back from going after the life that we always dreamed of.

What opportunities have you passed up through the years because you questioned yourself based solely on flaws you think you have, or others told you that you have? As you think about that question, also think about this truth: Working on your strengths will help you overcome anything that you consider a weakness.

Gallup Study

Over the past decade, Gallup has surveyed more than 10 million people worldwide on the topic of employee engagement (or how positive and productive people are at work) and their studies indicate that people who do have the opportunity to focus on their strengths every day are six times as likely to be engaged in their jobs and more than three times as likely to report having an excellent quality of life in general.

Gallup define strength as “consistent near perfect performance in an activity.”

Three of the most important principles of living a strength-based life:

First, for an activity to be a strength you must be able to do it consistently. And this implies that it is a predictable part of your performance. And you must also derive some intrinsic satisfaction from the activity. The acid test of a strength? The ability is a strength only if you can fathom yourself doing it repeatedly, happily, and successfully.

Second, you do not have to have strength in every aspect of your role in order to excel. That excellent performer must be well-rounded is one of the most pervasive myths. When Gallup studied them, excellent performers were rarely well-rounded. On the contrary, they were sharp.

Third, you will excel only by maximizing your strengths, never by fixing your weaknesses. This is not the same as saying “ignore your weaknesses.” The excellent performers did not ignore their weaknesses. Instead, they did something much more effective. They found ways to manage around their weaknesses, thereby freeing them up to hone their strengths to a sharper point.

What creates your strengths?

These three — talents, knowledge, and skills — combine to create your strengths.

Knowledge

Knowledge consists of the facts and lessons learned.

First, you need factual knowledge, which is content. Factual knowledge such as this won’t guarantee excellence, but excellence is impossible without it.

The second kind of knowledge you need is experiential, which isn’t taught in classrooms or found in manuals. Rather, it is something that you must discipline yourself to pick up along the way and retain. Every environment offers chances to learn. Clearly, to develop your strengths it is your responsibility to keep alert for these opportunities and then to incorporate them into your performance.

Over time each of us becomes more and more aware of who we really are. This growing awareness of self is vital to strength building because it allows each of us to identify more clearly our natural talents and to cultivate these talents into strengths.

Skills

Skills are the steps of an activity. A skill is designed to make the secrets of the best easily transferable. If you learn a skill, it will help you get a little better, but it will not cover for a lack of talent. Instead, as you build your strengths, skills will actually prove most valuable when they are combined with genuine talent.

Talents

Talent is any recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behaviour that can be productively applied. Thus, if you are instinctively inquisitive, this is a talent. If you are competitive, this is a talent. If you are charming, this is a talent. If you are persistent, this is a talent. If you are responsible, this is a talent. Any recurring pattern of thought, feeling, or behaviour is a talent if this pattern can be productively applied.

Why are your Talents Enduring and Unique?

Our talents are enduring and unique because they are a result of a combination of our genetics, life experiences, and personal interests.

Firstly, our genetics play a role in determining our natural abilities and predispositions. For example, some people may have a natural aptitude for music, while others may be more athletically inclined. These genetic factors can help to shape the unique talents that we possess.

Secondly, our life experiences also play a role in developing our talents. For example, if someone has grown up in a family of musicians or athletes, they may be more likely to develop those skills themselves. Similarly, if someone has had the opportunity to travel and experience different cultures, they may develop a talent for languages or cultural understanding.

Finally, our personal interests and passions also contribute to the development of our talents. When we enjoy something and are passionate about it, we are more likely to invest time and effort into developing our skills in that area. This can lead to a unique combination of talents that reflects our individual interests and strengths.

When you learn a skill, what you learn are the steps of an activity. With the learning you may weave a few new neural connections in the brain, but you do not learn how to reweave your entire network. The new skill you just acquired may be able to intervene in a few decisions and redirect you down one of your weaker connections, but only a few. Skills determine if you can do something, whereas talents reveal something more important: how well and how often you do it.

The point here is not that you should always forgo this kind of weakness fixing, but you should see it for what it is: damage control, not development. Damage control can prevent failure, but it will never elevate you to excellence.

The danger of repetitive training without underlying talent is that you burn out before you net any improvement. To improve at any activity requires persistence. To withstand the temptation to slacken off, you need internal drive. You need a way to derive energy from the process of improving so that you can keep improving.

Your talents, your strongest synaptic connections, are the most important raw material for strength building. Identify your most powerful talents, hone them with skills and knowledge, and you will be well on your way to living the strong life.

Learn to distinguish each one from the others. Identify your dominant talents and then in a focused way acquire the knowledge and skills to turn them into real strengths.

How can you identify your own talents?

There is one sure way to identify your greatest potential for strength: Step back and watch yourself for a while. Try an activity and see how quickly you pick it up, how quickly you skip steps in the learning and add twists and kinks you haven’t been taught yet. See whether you become absorbed in the activity to such an extent that you lose track of time. If none of these has happened after a couple of months, try another activity and watch — and another. Over time your dominant talents will reveal themselves, and you can start to refine them into a powerful strength.

While your spontaneous reactions provide the clearest trace of your talents, here are three more clues to keep in mind: yearnings, rapid learning, and satisfactions.

Yearnings reveal the presence of a talent, particularly when they are felt early in life. Your yearnings reflect the physical reality that some of your mental connections are simply stronger than others. So, no matter how repressive the external influences prove to be, these stronger connections will keep calling out to you, demanding to be heard. If you want to discover your talents, you should pay them heed.

Rapid learning offers another trace of talent. Sometimes a talent doesn’t signal itself through yearning. For a myriad of reasons, although the talent exists within you, you don’t hear its call. Instead, comparatively late in life, something sparks the talent, and it is the speed at which you learn a new skill that provides the clue to the talent’s presence and power.

Satisfactions provide the last clue to talent. Your strongest synaptic connections are designed so that when you use them, it feels good. Thus, obviously, if it feels good when you perform an activity, chances are that you are using a talent.

When you are performing a particular activity, if all you are thinking is — “When will this be over?” — more than likely you are not using a talent. But if you find yourself anticipating the activity — “When can I do this again?” — it is a pretty good sign that you are enjoying it and that one of your talents is in play.

Obstacles to Building One’s Strengths

While building one’s strengths can be a fulfilling and rewarding experience, there are several obstacles that can get in the way. Here are a few common obstacles to building one’s strengths:

1. Lack of self-awareness: In order to build our strengths, we need to first understand what they are. However, many people lack self-awareness and may not be fully aware of their own strengths and weaknesses. Without this understanding, it can be difficult to focus on building our strengths.
2. Lack of focus: Building strengths takes time and effort. If we are easily distracted or lack focus, it can be challenging to make progress in building our strengths.
3. Fear of failure: Trying new things and pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zones is often necessary for building our strengths. However, fear of failure can hold us back and prevent us from taking risks and trying new things.
4. Negative self-talk: Our inner dialogue can greatly impact our ability to build our strengths. Negative self-talk, such as telling ourselves that we’re not good enough or that we’ll never succeed, can be a major obstacle to building our strengths.
5. Lack of support: Building strengths is often easier when we have a support system in place. However, if we lack support from family, friends, or colleagues, it can be more challenging to stay motivated and make progress.

How to manage around weaknesses?

Weakness — anything that gets in the way of excellent performance.

First, identify if the weakness is a skills weakness, a knowledge weakness, or a talent weakness. If it’s hard to figure this out, go acquire the skills and knowledge you need in a certain area, and if your performance is still subpar, then you probably lack the talent.

Six other strategies for dealing with weakness:

1. Get a little better at it — for basic things (communicating, listening, organization), you need some level of ability, or they will undermine your real strengths.

2. Design a support system — Dealing with weakness can be challenging, so it’s important to seek support from others. This might involve working with a mentor, coach, or therapist, or seeking out advice and guidance from colleagues or friends.

3. Use one of your strengths to overwhelm your weakness.

4. Find a partner — Find someone with complementary themes of talent. For example, an entrepreneur with no knack for numbers might team up with a skilled accountant to fill that weakness. Requires a person to be able to admit a weakness in themselves.

5. Just stop doing it — If you stop doing something you’re not good at it’s possible nobody will notice or care. It’s possible you earn more respect. And it’s possible you’ll feel better about yourself.

6. Practice self-compassion: Finally, it’s important to practice self-compassion when dealing with weaknesses. Remember that everyone has areas where they struggle, and it’s okay to make mistakes and have setbacks. Be kind to yourself and focus on making progress rather than achieving perfection.

Everyone Is Good at Something

Whether it’s art, baseball, math, science, or whatever it is. Everyone is good at something, if not multiple things, so you dig for it and find it. You should focus on what you are good at and try to become great at it. When you become great at that one thing, your confidence goes through the roof, and it trickles down to all areas of your life.

Have you been holding on to a weakness? Have you been letting it somehow define you, diminish your true value, or make you feel inferior? If so, can you see how it fuels this inner success-robbing villain? And can you see why it has to stop today?

Many adults inadvertently strip kids of their confidence and their abilities because of this insistence on addressing weaknesses. The truth is that when we’re taught to work on the things we suck at, it makes us struggle constantly and it diminishes our belief in ourselves.

Get Amazing at What You’re Already Good At

You’re good at something. I bet you are good, if not great, at a lot of things. Take a moment right now and write down a list of what you do well. Are you good at communicating? Are you good at selling? Are you good at just being honest? Are you good at being a friend? Are you good at being a listener? Are you good at organization and structure? Are you good at developing systems, or programming computers? Because here’s what I know: You possess gifts, your unique talents. There’s no real explanation as to why you’re good at some things, you just are. And your success depends on making it a habit to focus on improving what you’re already good at to the point of greatness.

Because we are told to work on the things that we naturally don’t do well, we focus on this little 10% bucket of things we suck at and ignore the other 90%. And out of that 90% there is undoubtedly something at which you excel. If you put energy and focus into the things that you’re good at and become great at them, you can eventually pay for someone else to do the things you are not good at. It will improve every area of your life.

Developing your Strengths

1. Identify the kinds of activities you are naturally drawn to and determine ways to do more of them.

2. Focus on things that you seem to pick up quickly and invest in ways to master them.

3. Rely on the activities that you seem to naturally and automatically know the steps to complete.

4. Find more ways to incorporate activities that provide moments of unconscious excellence, moments when you thought, “How did I do that?”

5. Appreciate the things that give you energy or enjoyment, either while doing them or immediately after finishing them. These are the activities that make you think, “When can I do that again?”

So, create your “good at” list and then, next to each entry, write down how you can improve those skills and enhance those abilities to become great at them. As you do this exercise, don’t even think about your weaknesses. You’re soon going to realize that if you can spend all of your focus, energy, time, and effort on the things you’re good at, you can overcome all the other things at which you’re not so talented. Becoming exceptionally good at one key skill is far more valuable than struggling for years and years to become average at the things that you find difficult.

References

Lehmann, J. (2006). The Strengths Approach, Wayne McCashen, St Luke’s Innovative Resources, Bendigo, 2005. Children Australia, 31(2), 43–43. doi: 10.1017/s1035077200011123

Proctor, C., Maltby, J., & Linley, P. (2010). Strengths Use as a Predictor of Well-Being and Health-Related Quality of Life. Journal Of Happiness Studies, 12(1), 153–169. doi: 10.1007/s10902–009–9181–2

Rath, T. Strengthsfinder 2.0.