Are Your Strengths Being Used Effectively?

Q: What do you get from a pampered cow?

A: Spoiled milk

I will wait until I am sure you laughed at that…

Still waiting ….

Hmmm….

Yeah that one was bad….

Let’s move on quickly…..

How often do you get to play to your strengths?

How do you feel when you are utilizing your strengths regularly?

How does it feel when you rarely get to utilize them?

I can relate to using them regularly and rarely getting to utilize them. When I think back to a time when I was rarely using my strengths, I can vividly recall the feelings of a lack of confidence, feeling rubbish at what I do, anxious a lot and generally not happy.

Not a place I remember fondly, but in adversity does come strength and lessons learned. Specifically, for me I learnt to value what my strengths are and also learnt that working on your weaknesses can be important, but if you can find a place that leverages your strengths, and you can hide your weaknesses then that’s what you should strive for.

Don’t get me wrong, you can build on your weaknesses, and by hiding them I mean understanding if what you are not good at truly matters. You can also see if someone else on your team (work, or personal) has that strength and you can see if you can leverage them more.

In my humble opinion we spend way too much time focusing on what we and others are not good at and nowhere near enough time focusing on what we and others are really good at.

Which leads to criticism, unhappiness, lack of confidence and generally getting stuck in that negative cycle.

When you are lacking confidence, cannot get any forward momentum, not trusting yourself and feeling anxious then you need to be able to find some positivity and start building your confidence step by step.

This takes time, a lot of energy, trust in yourself that you may be lacking, and also a lot of perseverance and resiliency.

One way to do this is to start feeling better about yourself.

You can do that by focusing and knowing what your strengths are and figuring out a way to play more to them over a 28-day period.

Why 28 days I didn’t hear you ask?

Because that helps build habits and momentum and builds them on a strong foundation because these are your strengths, what you excel at, what you rock at, and no one can take that away from you!

Upon a strong foundation you can then start building.

To help you with this I have a free resource for you.

I call it ‘strengths in action’.

It helps you identify your strengths and come up with a 28-day plan on how to use them.

Your First Move (danquinlan.com)

Cheering you on,

Dan

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This post was previously published on Dan Quinlan’s blog and is republished on Medium.

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