How to overcome blockages that are holding us back from reaching our potential.
When to Develop Your Strengths
When people think of developing skills, the default assumption is to look at their weaknesses and try to fix them. Most of the time this is wrong because it’s impossible to be good at everything in life. If you try to be an expert in everything, you will only ever be an expert in nothing.
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The wonderful thing about people is that we are all diverse. Different people have different strengths and that’s where “Strength in Diversity” comes from. The way you can make the biggest contribution (and therefore the most valuable contribution to employers) is by focussing on your strengths and then improve these skills.
On the other hand if you take a weakness and work on it hard, you might only get to be average at it.
Imagine for a little while that you are a young Usain Bolt. You have a natural gift for sprinting but your weakness is long distance running. What skill should you work on - your strength or your weakness?
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10000 times”
Bruce Lee
Bruce Lee summarized why focus is more powerful than trying to do everything. But one talent is not enough. And that’s where finding your Skills Sweetspot and Developing your USP come in.
There are also times when you should work on your weaknesses. See the article on Weaknesses to find out if you have a blindspot that is holding you back.
Next Steps: Self-Leadership: Developing Yourself
Developing your strengths is a key factor in self-leadership. To be a better self-leader start with improving your self-leadership skills with self-leadership training. Self-Leadership: Developing Yourself is a quick, online training course that you can use to kick-start your self-development.
Comments:
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