How to discover your strength and weaknesses to grow your career
Have you ever heard about strength and weaknesses? Do you know how to find out what yours are?
Many people have in mind that understanding their strength and weaknesses is only used to answer questions in a job interview. However, knowing your strengths and weaknesses can significantly help your personal and career development.
Furthermore, this personal discovery has several layers, peculiarities, and ways of understanding and dealing with it. It is also possible to change over time when new goals and learning enter our lives.
Do you want to understand your strength and weaknesses and how to use this knowledge to grow? So, continue reading; we will teach you how to see and use them to your advantage!
What are your strengths and weaknesses?
Strengths are characteristics that make a person stand out from others. This happens for several reasons.
Whether it’s because you have more ease with something, have more experience, or even a higher level of skill – and even enjoy a specific activity more.
The weaknesses are the opposite. These are tasks and behaviours that an individual has some difficulty performing. They need to be improved. Otherwise, they can affect the person’s career or development.
It is necessary to understand that these weaknesses are not necessarily fixed.
With the natural course of life and career, we gain new skills, new learning, and, above all, new demands and needs every day.
Therefore, while today, a weakness attracts attention because it is decisive for an objective, tomorrow, it may become irrelevant if you decide to change your objective. However, you may feel the need to develop another issue that was not important before.
Therefore, our strengths and weaknesses must have context in our lives and are part of something bigger. So, our energy on improving them makes sense for our professional and personal goals.
Examples of strength and weaknesses
You can identify as a weak point, for example, your oratory.
Let’s say you want a management or speaking opportunity. If you don’t like or are unfamiliar with public speaking, you will need to develop this skill.
You can also choose your attention to detail as a strong point, for example, if you stand out for deliveries with higher quality and fewer errors.
With this, we separate a weak point and a strong point by giving them context, not just determining them without any explanation.
For example, if a person considers their ease or experience in dealing with Excel to be a strong point, but this is not a skill that will be used at the current moment in life, then it is often not, in fact, a strong point.
Important to identify strength and weaknesses
Planning our assets and shortcomings is critical to see more about ourselves. By remembering your assets, you will want to settle on better choices.
Such as going after another position, tolerating an advancement, and, surprisingly, hanging out in a meeting. In a similar sense, understanding your shortcomings will give you similar data.
You can make strategic decisions to improve your weaknesses, such as starting a new course or training a new skill. All this will amplify your self-knowledge, helping you make decisions more clearly.
How to discover your strength and weaknesses
So far, talking about strength and weaknesses has been light. When we put the discovery of these points on the agenda, it may become more difficult for some people.
This is because it is easier to evaluate those around us than ourselves, as looking within can be challenging. Even so, it is essential to exercise self-knowledge and not become discouraged.
Accepting your qualities and defects is the first step to understanding your strength and weaknesses. Start looking at them a little more strategically. Try to think about those qualities that people notice in you.
When someone asks you for help with something, what is it? It’s because? Understanding this can also help you. On the other hand, is there a defect or skill that you lack that you would like to have for some specific situations?
1. Self-observation
After thinking about these questions, observe yourself and understand which tasks you can most easily handle and why.
What abilities hang out in your day-to-day routine, and for what reasons? Self-perception is fundamental to discovering more about yourself and your assets and shortcomings.
This will likewise permit you to find different particularities of your day-to-day routine, how you respond to specific events, which assignments you like to do most, and which you like least…
You could find things that can assist you with sorting out your daily schedule, for example, when you are generally helpful, how long your centre endures, and which action you perform best at, among numerous others.
This makes it easier to adapt your routine to your best and worst moments and your strengths and weaknesses.
2. SWOT Analysis
Although self-observation brings several answers about your strengths and weaknesses, you must know what to do with them. It is not enough to identify them. The idea is to use this information to grow and develop your personal and professional life.
One way to use this information strategically is the SWOT Analysis, a tool widely used by companies that can also apply to your life.
SWOT is an abbreviation of 4 words in English:
- Strengths
- Weaknesses
- Opportunities
- Threats
To put it into practice, make four quadrants on paper. First, you will put your strengths, which are what have the potential to make you stand out. In the second quadrant, your weaknesses need to be improved.
Below, in the third quadrant, you will write opportunities, mapping all the good, productive, and possibilities that your strengths can bring you.
Finally, in the fourth quadrant, you will write the threats: how your weaknesses can threaten you in general. Once mapped out, you can use it tactically, with a goal in mind.
It’s a simple exercise mapping everything you’ve ever observed about yourself. Another exercise you can do is the Wheel of Life.
Read more:- See 7 steps to re-enter the job market
How to work on your weaknesses and enhance your strengths
By determining your strength and weaknesses, you can begin to work on them strategically, always aiming for your personal and professional growth.
To work on your weaknesses, understand which aspects of your life affect you. Then, make a plan on how to develop them.
For example, if you consider your public speaking a weak point because you don’t have much experience with public speaking or consider yourself too shy, looking for theatre courses is an option.
You can also look for tips on speaking in public and practising by recording videos of yourself talking about a topic you understand. It doesn’t have to be a topic related to your work; it can be about your football team or the series you’re currently watching.
To best leverage your strengths, consider incorporating them into everyday activities to use them to your advantage. If your strong point is your leadership, how can you best use it? Look for leadership situations, such as a position that favours this trait or projects that highlight your point. This way, you can reach the most significant potential of your strengths while working to develop your weaknesses.
Know more:- How to overcome a lack of confidence.
