What Are Your Strengths--And How Can You Use Them More?
Gregg Vanourek
Personal development & leadership excellence. Helping you craft your life & work. Co-author, LIFE Entrepreneurs & Triple Crown Leadership. Author, TEDx speaker, teacher. New book in the works on the traps of living.
Disengaged at work? Not energized and thriving in your life? It’s all too common.
What’s going on? It could be that you’re not using your strengths—the things you’re good at—regularly.
Are you focused on fixing your weaknesses instead of leveraging your strengths? Maybe you’re engaged in tasks you’d rather avoid, such as those that bore you or challenge your confidence. Do you keep doing something even when others excel in that task and you don’t? Meanwhile, it just drains you.
This is a recipe for frustration and failure. A better approach: actively shape your work and life to align with your strengths.
What’s a Strength?
Strengths are the things at which you most excel.
Knowledge, skills, and talents are the foundational components of strengths. Their development is influenced by additional factors, including practice, coaching, repetition, and feedback. Through consistent repetition and targeted guidance, coupled with feedback on your performance, you can significantly enhance your capabilities.
The Advantages of Knowing and Using Your Strengths
Researchers highlight significant advantages associated with understanding and leveraging your strengths. For instance, doing so can:
Having a coach can help, since you probably have some strengths you’re not aware of. (When you’re good at something, you often assume others have no problem with it as well.) A coach can also help you figure out ways to develop and use your strengths more effectively.
Strengths Search: A New Tool for Identifying Your Strengths
Instead of sitting around trying to think of your strengths, you can take a strengths assessment to help you with this process. My new Strengths Search tool prompts you to do the following:
(Use my Strengths Search tool to identify your core strengths so you can integrate them more into your life and work. And share your strengths with your colleagues and family and learn about their strengths.)
How You Can Leverage Strengths as a Leader
Strengths are highly relevant if you’re a leader. They can be a catalyst for high performance. How? Four ways.
First, leaders should actively identify and employ their own strengths in their work.
Second, they ought to scrutinize strengths during personnel selection, advancement decisions, and the structuring of job roles and teams. A team should be well-rounded and have people with complementary strengths.
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Third, leaders should ensure that all team members are using their strengths as much as possible.
Fourth, leaders should develop the strengths of everybody on the team, including themselves.
Conclusion
By identifying your strengths and integrating them more into your life and work, you can experience heightened engagement, vitality, and success. Imagine channeling these strengths towards a higher purpose, leveraging them to serve others. The possibilities are enticing and powerful.
Wishing you well with it.
–Gregg
Reflection Questions
Tools for You
Additional Resources
Postscript: Inspirations on Strengths
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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, and TEDx speaker on personal development and leadership. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!
(A version of this article first appeared on Gregg Vanourek's blog.)
Engineer, MBA, Entrepreneur, Chairman, Director, Strategy Twenty-five years founding, building, and operating large international data networks in US, UK, and Europe.
6moI need a good self assessment now to help me filter the many new ideas bubbling up! Oh, and need to post a picture that looks like my mirror!
Former business executive, leadership author, and speaker.
6moThe strength search is a excellent tool you have developed for your portfolio. I took the exercise and found several things I need to do to realign myself with where I want to go and be. I encourage others to do the same. Well done, son.
Helping managers elevate and empower their teams.
6moI love this Gregg! I am particularly fond of Marcus Buckingham's work in this area. I am biased because he was a guest lecturer during my grad program! I have always remembered something that he said relative to our strengths: that sometimes we confuse simply what we are good at with a true strength. He said that a true strength is something that gives us energy. If an activity -- no matter how good we are at it -- doesn't give us energy then it isn't a true strength. That resonated for me because there are many things that I am good at, but they drain the life out of me! This just helped me understand myself and my capabilities better -- and how to strategically use them.