Do You Know Your Strengths?

NEW CLIENT ARTICLE:

By Bruno Raynal, Blue Thinking

To know your strengths is to truly know yourself, and vice versa. Your strengths are your natural talents that you can hone to achieve great things. Whether it’s in your personal or professional life, in a romantic relationship or at work, your strengths are what define the best part of you.

You can unlock a lot of doors when you know your strengths and put them to work for you. If you’re competing with a coworker for a promotion, for instance, you can make yourself the obvious choice if you embrace and unleash your strengths. A little hard work never hurt either, of course, but you may be doing yourself a huge disservice if you don’t know your strengths and consciously apply them to get what you want.

Still, too many people seem to refuse to acknowledge their strengths. They attribute their success to good luck and their failures to bad luck. In doing so they negate the fact that their innate talents—their pure strengths—were the key factors in their success.

All too often we get caught up in trying to be all things to all people. In trying to do so we tend to focus on our weaknesses and try to fix those instead of promoting our strengths. A large part of accepting your true self means rejecting the idea that you need to focus on your weaknesses to improve your performance at work.

Not true. You need to focus on and know your strengths! While it’s true we can all improve weaker areas, there’s nothing more powerful than developing the strengths we already know we have. Much like our natural strengths, our weaknesses are, to a large extent, innate as well. So why do we spend so much time working on our weaknesses instead of developing our strengths, especially when we’re trying to excel at our jobs?

In business, great leadership can be defined as being clear about what you stand for, what you expect from employees, and charting a path for them to achieve those expectations. Then you must have the courage of your convictions to stand by your beliefs no matter what the cost. Employees respond well to leaders who know their strengths and are confident in their assertions.

If you don’t quite know your strengths and want to get a better idea of exactly what they are, ask yourself these questions:

• If you were asked to list your top five personality traits, how long would it take to answer?
• Would you consider these traits to be strengths or weaknesses?
• Do you know why you do what you do?
• What are your key values that guide your life both personally and professionally?
• What do people who know you expect from you?
• How do you make decisions?
• What is your natural leadership style?
• What motivates you to perform at your very best?

Do you think of yourself as a leader? Do you know your strengths and do you point-out the strengths of others so they can be better employees? When you focus on strengths, you raise expectations. You motivate. You make a powerful impact. You transform yourself and your organization.

When you know your strengths and put them to work you can be more productive, deliver more value, stand out as a leader and be compensated for it, realize better results, truly enjoy your work, and achieve greater fulfillment in everything you do.

At Blue Thinking, we coach leaders to know their strengths, grow as people, and become better leaders. Those are some of our strengths. What are yours? Call 619.550.8052 or visit www.ThinkBlueThinking.com to let us know and see how we can help reinvigorate your business.

Bruno Raynal is the president and CEO of Blue Thinking, a corporation based in San Diego, California. Bruno works with top level senior management to enhance their awareness of modern business practices and patterns so they can make informed choices, take the right action, and achieve their vision and goals. Learn more about Blue Thinking by visiting www.ThinkBlueThinking.com or calling 619.550.8052.