Leading with your strengths gives you a natural, positional advantage that can make your work life easier, your business more productive and far more fulfilling.
Are you leading with your strengths or are you settling and struggling by engaging your weaknesses? Strengths are our natural talents, powers, qualities, tendencies, capacities and characteristics. Weaknesses are inadequate or defective qualities – lacking strength and vigor.
If you find yourself struggling to complete projects or settling for less enjoyment and aliveness than you know is possible, chances are you’re underutilizing your strengths. What can you do about it?
Begin by journaling and reflecting on the following insights and questions.
- Become increasingly aware of when you are struggling and when your work has very little pizzazz to it. What are you engaged in when that happens? Then ask, what natural strength might I lean on to change my results or to change how I feel about my results? Then name that strength so you can claim it.
- Know that you are naturally more attractive and more poised when you are simply being yourself. Striving to be something you aren’t takes you out of the present. Yet the present is the only place that you have the power to get what you want. Trying to lead with strengths you don’t have actually postpones the process of being who you are. All good things come to those who are real.So, where are you faking it? In what areas of your life are you certain that you could never excel? What would happen if you just dropped all such activities today?
- Strengths actually enlarge the fierce and gentle capacities in our heart. Courage, compassion and generosity are more readily put into play when we lead with our strengths. When we are not leading with our strengths, we are leading with our limitations and compensations. These shortcomings are not elemental to our nature. They are illusions that we trick ourselves into believing to be true. Often when we are not leading with our strengths we make the false assumption that we must be lacking in some way. Know this, you aren’t lacking anything. If you don’t feel energized and strong, you’re being less than you could be by choice. How would your life be different if you only worked on projects where you could lead with your strengths? Who you are right now is more than enough. Believe that and act on it.
- Connect to divine guidance because that’s how our strengths were originally installed. Guidance comes easier to verbs than to nouns. Nouns tend to be permanent resting places. Verbs tend to be more alive, open, flowing and active. When searching for life’s purpose or true calling, many hit a dead end by seeking to identify a particular vocation or workplace. They often stop their search because these nouns have no vigor. And they’re lacking vigor because they’re lacking guidance. They would be better served to just show up and play. It’s the active doing in life that allows divine guidance to find us in the form of our own intuition. Get in movement and lead with your strengths and see what develops.
What’s one project you could begin playing with today? What do you have to lose by engaging it and seeing what develops? It’s a much wiser strategy than standing pat in frustration.
Your strengths are your hidden advantage and your natural competitive edge. Yet you may never experience the bliss of leading with them if you aren’t willing to invest the time and energy in rigorous self-examination, journaling and reflection. Decide today to leave the weak position of saying you don’t know what to do – or what you want to be when you grow up. Begin this honorable work and grow you will.
This is very powerful information to consider. I think one of the biggest dangers we face as we go through life is the desire to “be” someone else – or perhaps it is more a belief that, in order to succeed in a specific endeavor, that we must become the person that is already successful in it. The problem is, of course, that we lose ourselves. And as we lose ourselves trying to be, or become someone or something else, we also widen the gap between us and our strengths. For a long time, I follwed the advice of “fake it till you make it.” Maybe that works for some, but I doubt it. And it certainly didn;t work for me. Because if you’re faking it, you’re not you, and who are you then? You can’t be where you’re not, and you can;t be WHO you’re not, either.
Ever get the feeling someone is writing something specifically to you? Seriously, with every one of your blog’s, I really do think that! That’s right…I actually am able to believe that you created this entire blog just to communicate with me! Funny, eh? Seriously, though, I think it’s a great indication of how closely your messages are resonating with a lot of people.
Clem, It gives me great pleasure to hear you speaking so genuinely. You certainly understand that while we are trying to be someone other than whom we are, we will never excel.
Our only path to greatness lies on the other side of our own uniquely expressed truths. Glad to see you’re boldly walking that path with your eye wide open.
Hi Tom,
Love this article! We’re not often encouraged to truly and fully embrace our strengths. To stand up and say “I’m really, really good at …” and to take true ownership of our gifts is such a gift to ourselves. It’s easier, I think, to try and pound away at perceived weaknesses, because it lets us off the hook. “I can’t do that, I’m not that good at it.” But when we really own our strengths and gifts, we also become responsible for putting them to good use in life.
Great blog, I’m glad I visited!
Blessings,
Andrea
Good stuff Tom!
“Your strengths are your hidden advantage and your natural competitive edge.” And, “You are naturally more attractive .. when you are simply being yourself.”
Perhaps that is the ‘secret’ to “The Secret”. When you get in touch with and appreciate your true self, you are more likely to see The Law of Attraction bring you what you really want in life or in work. Probably both!
Simply put, you are most attractive when you are most yourself.
Staying aware of that important fact throughout the typical day is the challenge. Thus the emphasis on journaling to stay in touch with yourself and to enlarge your gratitude for those personal strengths (gifts) that are uniquely yours.
Be yourself = be more attractive = get more of what you really want!
Tip: How can you tell if you’re staying aware?
A smile on your face is usually a good sign!
John, there is much more wisdom in your smile comment then you may imagine. Particularly when it comes to ones attractiveness. Make sure to check out my next post on happiness that verifies your point.
Until then keep on smiling as you flaunt your core strengths!