Use your strengths every day!
In our culture, there is a lot of emphasis on trying to fix our weaknesses. Teachers, parents, family members, and our supervisors at work, are usually very diligent at pointing to the areas where we should improve.
Developing our weak areas makes intuitive sense, and we understand that they are all trying to make us grow. However, it’s less common to be called on our strengths. If we want to thrive, we won’t get there by only trying to improve our weak areas. We also need to leverage our strengths.
In his book “Growing the Positive Mind”, neuroscientist William Larking reports:
“Our weaknesses change, at the most, over the course of a life time no more that 3-7%. Our strengths, when identified and validated, are infinitely malleable”.
That means that it will much more productive for us to spend our energy in growing and using our strengths, rather than on improving our weaknesses.
Our strengths are those things that we are good at and enjoy doing. Because they come naturally to us, we usually dismiss them as non-important. However, when we use them, work seems to become easier, and we usually get a much higher level of concentration. Has it ever happen to you that you get so engrossed on an activity that you lose track of time? That is called ‘state of flow’, or ‘being in the zone’.
One of the conditions to reach the state of flow is that we must have a good balance between the perceived challenges of the task and our own perceived skills. One must have confidence in one’s ability to complete the task at hand. When we use our strengths, that we are maximizing our chances of successfully overcoming our challenges and meeting our goals.
If you want to know what your strengths are, I suggest that you take the free VIA Character Strengths Test. The VIA Institute on Character is a non-profit organization whose mission is bridging the science and practice of character strengths to build a better world.
The test was created under the direction of Dr. Martin Seligman, the “father of Positive Psychology” and it has become very popular around the world. At the time of this writing, almost 8 million people in 195 countries have taken it. That makes their conclusions of their research very trustworthy. They have observed that people who use their strengths every day are:
- 3x more likely to report having an excellent quality of life
- 6x more likely to be engaged at work
Here is how to use your strengths for added satisfaction and productivity:
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Identify your strengths
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Become familiar with your strengths and read them daily
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Connect each of your everyday activities to one or more your strengths
I am convinced that it is much more effective to spend our energy using and growing our strengths than trying to fix our deficiencies. And as leaders, we will have much better results by focusing on discovering the strength of the members of our team. Obviously we have to make some effort in overcoming our gaps, but if the majority of our energy is spent using our strengths, our results will be outstanding, we will have greater work satisfaction, engagement, and greater productivity. And, as an added benefit, we will be happier, as the work will feel easier to us.
