Your Strengths will take you further than your Weaknesses

There is greater opportunity in focusing to improve your strengths than there is to focus on improving your weaknesses.  Highly successful people are not void of weaknesses but their capacity to gain from their strengths is what propels them to accomplish great things.  

Time and time again we hear about an individual who has achieved great success and assume they do not have weaknesses.  Once their weaknesses come to light, often in a media circus, we suddenly feel that we were fooled into thinking this person was better in every aspect of their life.  It isn't that we were fooled, it was that they focused on their strengths to achieve, but their weaknesses brought them down.

The best way to know how to improve your strengths is to identify what areas you are strong in and what areas you are weak in.  There are countless ways to determine this, such as personality inventories, assessments, and strength finding tools.  Make sure to utilize something that is proven, identifies strengths and weaknesses, and explains their evaluation methods.  Without properly determining your strengths you will not really know what areas have opportunity.  Make sure to add skills that you excel at along with general personality traits, to truly gain a thorough evaluation of yourself.

Once you have identified strengths and skills that match that strength, become proactive in your quest to boost those abilities.  Many will think of an improvement organization such as Toastmasters as a group focused on improving weaknesses but if your strength is in public speaking, Toastmasters can be a great way to grow your communication abilities and will likely open up opportunities that you would otherwise not find.  Developing systems or finding organizations that have already created such systems is important for turning strengths into great growth and success.

After you have a thorough understanding of your strong areas, and have developed systems to improve those areas, don't be afraid to highlight those strengths to others.  Companies hire based on your strengths, not your weaknesses, businesses grow because of the competitive advantage, and athletes play roles that use their strengths to benefit their team.  Allow yourself to promote those strengths and even acknowledge areas that you are not best suited for.  If you are an entrepreneur, don't hire a consultant or take on a partner that matches your skill set, find ones that are strong where you are weak.  

Regardless of what you are good at, understand that growth by focusing on your weaknesses won't get you to great success.  Instead, identify your strengths, build systems to improve those strengths, and allow those strengths to grow.  Then you can truly realize your full potential.  

System tip:  Initially it may be beneficial to focus your systems on weak areas.  Once you get past a certain point, though, you will notice that you plateau.  Focus should then turn to improving your strengths.  An example is when you find yourself in debt.  First, focus on getting out of debt, then look to strengths to boost your capacity to earn.  Trying to ignore areas that keep dragging you down will not help in the long term and will prevent you from even getting to “break-even”.

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