How to Identify Your Strengths
Many of us think we suck at many things. However, in between, there are lots of things we are very good at that can be beneficial to us if only we would take our time to identify them.
To identify your strength is to identify your unique qualities or what you are good at. There are many things that we are good at, but we may not be conscious of them. Therefore, you should regularly practice identifying your strengths to recognize and seek out the environments that can help you thrive.
Five (5) areas you can find your strengths include;
- Your Skills: Your skills are the abilities you have acquired through training. E.g., computing skills.
- Your Talents: Talents are inborn abilities rather than those acquired through training; e.g., contortion- the natural ability of some people to flex parts of their body in an unusual form.
- Your Knowledge: These can be facts or information acquired through experience or education about a subject matter. E.g., Religious knowledge
- Your Personality: Your unique behavior, quality, or trait e.g., charisma.
- Your Physical Body Forms or attributes: E.g., your muscles, height, etc.
All of these contribute to our strengths in different ways and can make us better suited for certain professions, work environments, or opportunities than other people. The question is; how do we become aware or conscious of our unique skills, talents, knowledge, personality, or unique body forms that define our strengths.
Two effective ways we can do that include:
1. By reflecting
Reflecting is a powerful tool that can help you identify your strength. To reflect means to think deeply and fairly analyze something that has happened in the past. To identify your strengths by reflecting, you should think deeply about those times you experienced and accomplished great success. Carefully analyze those situations and ask yourself; “How did I achieve such success?” “What qualities of mine helped me achieve them?”
For instance, one of these successes could be winning a debate, and the quality that helped you win could be your charisma. But, because these are rare events that happened by chance, you may not notice them. So, until you begin to reflect and ponder upon your time of success and what led to those successes you may not know that you have got some strengths.
Furthermore, reflecting and remembering how you achieved success can boost your self-confidence, assuring you that yes, you can do certain things with certain qualities that you have identified, and these can be a ladder to help you achieve more success.
2. By paying attention to what people appreciate about you
One of the most reliable ways to identify what you are good at is to pay attention to what others have to say about you and what you do. Consider what aspects of your work and life you receive the most compliments and determine which attributes or abilities allow you to achieve them. By doing this, you would figure out what your strengths are. That could be a recurring compliment about your leadership abilities, your unique voice, etc.
In conclusion, once you can identify your strengths, you must put them into use. Create a mission statement that specifies what you would do with them.
For instance, if your strength is your unique body build, your mission statement might be, “I would leverage my unique body build to become a model.” Remind yourself of your mission statement regularly so as not to lose focus.
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