Capitalizing On Your Strengths To Achieve Success
I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position one has reached in life as by the obstacles he has overcome while trying to succeed. —Booker T. Washington
You are extraordinary! The odds are more than 50 billion to 1 against there ever being anyone with the unique combination of talents, skills, and abilities that you bring to your life and to your world. The incredible things that you can do and be, no one knows, not even you. However, the one thing we do know is that virtually everything noteworthy that you will ever achieve will come from your ability to identify your areas of greatest strength and then to capitalize on them in every situation.
Your Area of Excellence
Each person has one or more “areas of excellence” that, if properly exploited, would enable them to be, have, and do, almost anything they could possibly want. Each person, as the result of years of education and experience, has developed possibilities that make him or her different from all other people. The men and women who achieve the most, in every field, are invariably those who have taken the time to identify their areas of greatest strengths and then to capitalize on them continuously.
Life is the study of attention. Where your attention goes, there will your heart be, too. The people, things, and events that hold your attention are indicative of your entire mental makeup. The things you are interested in are an indication of what you should be doing more of.
Choose the Right Field
In one longitudinal study examining 1,500 men and women who started out eager and ambitious at the beginning of their careers, they found that only 83 of them, over the course of 20 years, became millionaires.
When they went back and studied the attitudes and decisions of these people, as they had evolved over the 20 years, they found that all millionaires had one thing in common. They had all chosen fields they enjoyed and then become totally absorbed in what they were doing. They had gone to work in an area of endeavour in which they were extremely interested and which held their entire attention. They had then thrown their whole hearts into becoming very good in that area, developing the strengths necessary to succeed in that field. They had then capitalized on those strengths by becoming better and better progressively over time.
The conclusion of the study was that success, wealth, and happiness seemed to occur when a person was completely pre-occupied doing something else. The wealthy people in this study never set out to make a lot of money. Instead, they set out to find fields that they really enjoyed, and then they
devoted themselves to them. The money came as an afterthought.
Happiness and Satisfaction
The flip side of this equation is that you will never really be happy or satisfied until you have found a way to apply your unique human capabilities to your life and to your career. In the book, Working, by Studs Terkel (Pantheon Books, 1974), he reports that more than 80 percent of people
do not feel that their full potential is being utilized in their work. They may be busy and they may be reasonably satisfied, but, way down deep, they feel that there is far more that they could do if given the right situation and the right opportunity. You probably feel this way yourself, from time to time.
This is called the feeling of divine discontent. It is a feeling of uneasiness and dissatisfaction that arises whenever you are not fully challenged by what you are doing. To enjoy high levels of happiness and success, you must be working at the outer edge of your envelope. You must be stretching your capabilities continually. You must have a feeling that you are growing, day by day, with the challenges that your work is putting on you.
Without that feeling of challenge and growth, you will experience a nagging discontent, and this is a good sign. Discontent and dissatisfaction almost always precede a constructive change that forces you to change and starts you growing, once more.
Living Congruently
Men and women with clear values, who are living their lives consistent with their highest aspirations, are those who have a deep sense of self-confidence and well-being. The most important value you can have is the value of integrity. Integrity is the value that guarantees all the others. Having integrity means that you will not compromise on what you believe to be right, in any area.
Integrity is absolutely essential if you want to capitalize on your strengths. It means, more than anything, looking at yourself honestly and making your decisions based on the fact that you are an extraordinary human being. Your feelings are very valuable clues to your choices and behaviour. Your peace of mind and personal satisfaction is perhaps the most accurate guide you will ever have to doing what is right for you.
Courage Is Essential
In combination with integrity, courage is the most important quality you can have if you want to be happy and successful. If integrity means being honest with yourself, then courage means having the strength of mind to follow where your heart leads you. Courage means having the ability to push aside all other considerations in order to remain true to the very best that is in you.
Winston Churchill said, “Courage is rightly considered the foremost of the virtues, for upon it, all others depend.”
You know by now that fear is the greatest single enemy of success and self-fulfilment. It is not that people don’t know what to do; it is usually that they are afraid to do what their hearts tell them to do. However, when you build up your courage, act by act, you gradually overcome your fears.
With courage, your whole world opens up before you. Your self-confidence increases. You reach the point at which there are no longer any limitations on what you will attempt and what you will commit yourself to.
Follow Your Heart
One of the greatest of the impressionist painters was a man named Paul Gauguin. He lived in Paris, had a family, and worked in the post office for many years. In the evenings, he visited the cafes frequented by the impressionist painters of Paris, getting to know them and asking them questions. He was fascinated by painting. The whole idea of painting absorbed all his attention. It was all he thought about. And yet with a family and a full-time job, there was no way he could devote himself to the painting he wanted so badly to do.
One day, in a move that shocked everybody, he gave up his job as a postal inspector, left his family, and moved to the South Sea island of Tahiti. There, he began painting, poor quality at the beginning, but gradually improving as he developed his skill.
His paintings now are worth hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars, and they hang in the finest museums in the world. He is considered by many to be one of the most important painters of the last three hundred years.
Be Honest with Yourself
To follow your heart, you don’t necessarily need to make dramatic changes in your life or in your relationships. What you do need to do is to see yourself honestly, as you really are, and have the courage to channel your energies and focus your strengths into your areas of greatest potential. When you do this, you will soon realize that you have made one of the best decisions of your life.
Each person has great strengths and potentialities, and each person is put on this earth to harness those strengths and apply them to benefiting themselves and mankind. The life stories of the great men and women of history are usually stories of people who discovered their strengths and utilized them to the fullest degree.
Churchill was a great statesman and orator. Florence Nightingale was a tremendous organizer. Florence Chadwick was an incredibly strong swimmer. Abraham Lincoln was a far-sighted and compassionate politician and president. Mother Theresa was a truly loving human being with an infinite capacity to care for and support the sick and dying people of Calcutta.
Compensating for Weaknesses
No discussion of strengths would be complete without a discussion of weaknesses. Strong people have strong weaknesses, as well. In fact, most people have far more weaknesses than they have strengths. You may be strong in a few areas, but weak in hundreds of other areas.
Weaknesses are an inevitable and unavoidable fact of life. As Peter Drucker said, “All innovations must be simple if they are to work, because there are only incompetent people to carry them out. The one thing that we will always have in abundance is incompetence.”
Drucker wasn’t being unkind. He was being realistic and pointing out that most people are incompetent, or at best average, just in different areas. The challenge with human weaknesses is that unhappy and unsuccessful people have a tendency to focus on them. They become preoccupied with their weaknesses and think about their lack of talent and ability too much of the time. They lose sight of the fact that each person has strengths that may need to be developed, and that these strengths can bring them everything they want. Instead, they dwell continually on their areas of lesser competence rather than on their areas of potential excellence.
Developing Strength and Resiliency
We are all brought up with feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. Our self-esteem and selfconfidence are fragile. Our positive feelings about ourselves are like balloons—easily popped. We have to work on ourselves for a long time to build ourselves up to the point at which we are tough and resilient, especially in the areas in which we make mistakes and drop the ball.
Every person is a combination of peaks and valleys. You have areas of great potential strength and you have multiple areas of weakness, where you perform in an average or mediocre way. Drucker also wrote: “The goal of business is to maximize strengths and make weaknesses irrelevant.”
The law of concentration has an inordinate impact on the person you become. Whatever you dwell on grows in your life. Strong, competent people are those who dwell on their strengths and abilities. Weak people are those who dwell on their weaknesses and their inabilities.
You always have the choice of looking at your glass as being either half full or half empty. However, to develop and maintain high levels of success and happiness that go with it, you must consciously choose to dwell on your strengths most of the time.
You Are a Bundle of Resources
One of the most obvious characteristics of leaders in public life is that they view themselves as bundles of resources that can be utilized in many different ways, like a tool can be used to achieve different results. Leaders are adamant about applying themselves only in those areas in which they
can perform well and make a significant difference. They focus only on those areas in which they can succeed because of their special talents.
One of the best questions you can ask yourself, over and over, is “What can I, and only I, do that, if done well, will make an extraordinary difference in my situation?”
The law of concentration also says that all great success in life comes from single-minded, focused concentration on doing one thing or a few things extremely well. Success comes from staying at a particular task, the most valuable and important task you could be doing, until you succeed.
Every great human achievement is preceded by an extended period of dedicated, concentrated effort. However, there is little to be gained by digging determinedly, if you’re digging in the wrong place. As Benjamin Tregoe, management consultant, said, “The very worst use of time is to do well what need not be done at all.”
Assess Your Strengths and Weaknesses
This brings us to the importance of self-assessment with regard to your strengths. When we do strategic planning for corporations, we deal continually with what is called concentration of power. Where does and where can the company focus and concentrate its resources to achieve
extraordinary results in a competitive market?
We start from the viewpoint that a company has a certain degree of flexibility in determining what it offers to justify its existence in the marketplace. We say that the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. The customer or the person that the company is organized to serve in some way is central to every calculation and every decision. We put the imaginary customer in the middle of the table and strategically plan with him or her in mind.
Increase Your Return on Energy
The critical issue in corporate strategic planning is to increase the return on equity invested in the corporation. It is to allocate and deploy assets in such a way that the rewards that the company earns are greater than they would be in the absence of the planning exercise. We start off with
establishing clear values, a clear vision of what the company wants to become in the future, and a written mission statement that describes the strategic objective and positioning for the company.
Each person needs to do the same for him- or herself. The purpose of your personal strategic planning is to enable you to increase your return on energy. Because your time is your life, and your mental, emotional, and physical energies are your most valuable resources, your job is to organize your efforts in such a way as to give you maximum rewards and satisfaction for your energy invested.
Differentiate Yourself
Each company and each product or service either has or must develop a unique selling proposition. This is the key to differentiating the company and the company’s products and services from the competition. Often, this is called a competitive advantage. Sometimes we call it an area of superiority.
In every case, it is essential to determine how, where, why, and in what degree a particular company or product differs from every other company that is competing with it for the right to create and keep customers in that market niche. What applies to competitive businesses applies to you, too.
You Are the C.E.O of You, Group of companies
You are the C.E.O of your own life. You are the C.E.O of your own personal services company. You are in business for yourself. You are self-employed. No matter who signs your pay cheque, you are working for yourself from the day you take your first job to the day you retire.
You may work at someone else’s office or company, but you are always self-employed. The failure of many people to recognize this fact of self-employment and to behave as though this were true is a major reason for underperformance, unhappiness, and failure in working life.
As the C.E.O of your own company, selling your services in the marketplace to the highest bidder, you are completely responsible for identifying your own unique selling proposition.
What is it that you do better than anyone else? Why are you special or different? What is your area of competitive advantage? If you had to write, in 25 words or less, exactly why someone should hire and promote and pay you to do a particular job, rather than hire, promote, and pay someone
else, what would you point out as your area of superiority?
Join the Top 3 Percent
Many people have a tough time with this question. What matters at this point, though, is that you are asking the question at all. The very fact that you are thinking this way is moving you rapidly into the top 3 percent of working people. Only the top 3 percent see themselves as self-employed
and self-responsible, and they are the most respected and important people in any organization.
Your first question is, What am I really good at today? What is my personal area of competitive advantage or superiority in my current job?
We are all responsible for asking and answering these questions for ourselves, today and throughout our careers. No one else can or will do it for us. The amount of knowledge in every field is doubling every two to three years. Your skills are becoming obsolete at a more rapid rate than ever before, and new skills are essential for survival, not to mention success in highly competitive markets.
If your knowledge and skill isn’t doubling every two to three years in your field, you will soon be out of your business, and someone else will have your job. Whatever got you to where you are today is not enough to get you any further, as the title of Marshall Goldsmith’s best-selling book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (Writers of the Round Table Press, 2011), suggests. This is an inevitable and unavoidable fact of working life.
Designing Your Future
Your next question is, What could my area of competitive advantage be? Of all the areas in which I might be able to develop an area of superiority and become really good, taking my values and goals into consideration, what could it be?
The final question, perhaps the most important question on this subject, is the question, What should my area of competitive advantage be?
If you could be really excellent at any one skill sometime in the future, what one skill would help you the most to move to the top of your field? Imagine that you have no limitations on what you could learn and master. To accelerate your career, what should you really be good at some time in
the future?
Be Prepared to Develop New Skills
It often happens that your strengths are like muscles, undeveloped and requiring a long period of exercise to build up to the point where you can begin to win competitions. Michael Jordan said: “Everybody has talent, but to translate it into ability takes hard work.”
A journey of a thousand leagues begins with a single step. You start by sitting down and setting goals for yourself. You decide where you are now and where you want to be at a specific time in the future. What additional knowledge and skills will do the most to help you to increase your return on energy invested? In what areas will a particular skill be useful and valuable to you and enable you to stand out from others?
Be Aware of Yourself
The key to becoming a fully functioning, fully integrated personality, the basic factors underlying success, is for you to become more aware of who you really are, and what you really want in life.
Sometimes, as a result of looking inward, you will discover opportunities for great breakthroughs in your life that you may never have seen before. You begin with the process of self-disclosure. In determining your strengths for the future, you begin to engage in a search process to explore all the different areas in which you may have hidden talents. One form of self-disclosure is to fill out a series of questionnaires and tests that examine parts of your personality and skills of which you might be unaware.
Invest in Yourself
If you have the time and the money, a detailed process of personality and career counselling is a very valuable exercise that can have a major influence on the rest of your career. If you lack either the time or the money, there are many books full of self-grading tests available. You can take these tests yourself, and they will give you very accurate feedback. There are several companies that have developed entire batteries of self-grading assessment instruments, each of which can give you insights into your strengths and weaknesses in particular areas.
Self-Analysis and Self-Disclosure
There are also a series of exercises in self-analysis and self-disclosure that you can complete yourself with just a pen and paper. These exercises can often open your eyes and help you to see possibilities that may surprise you.
The first exercise is for you to realize that you have already done many things and played many roles in life. Starting in childhood, you have learned how to do and perform a remarkable variety of tasks. You have a tremendous number of skills and talents that you have developed over time,
many of which you simply take for granted.
List All Your Current Skills and Capabilities
The first exercise for you is to write down a list of everything that you do on a regular basis. Write out all your roles and the parts you play, from the time you get up in the morning, until the time you go to bed at night. If you play sports or exercise with various equipment, write them out. If you are a parent, cook, a dishwasher, a driver, a shopper, a reader, a writer, a worker performing various jobs, a buyer, a seller, a negotiator, a teacher, a manager, a salesperson, a typist, a telephone-answering person, and whatever else you can think of, write it down. Be as detailed as possible.
Walk through your day, minute by minute and hour by hour, and write out everything that you do over the course of a day, a month, and a year. When you’ve completed this list, you will be astonished at how many skills you have developed and which you use on a regular basis.
Cluster Your Roles and Activities
The second part of this self-disclosure and self-analysis exercise is for you to make a new list on which you begin to cluster the various things you do into categories. One of your categories may be parenting. Under the parenting heading, write down all the things you do as a parent that are
part of parenting. As a wife or husband, write down everything you do as a wife or husband, which you perhaps would not do if you were not married.
If you are a manager or a sales person, or if you hold any other position, write down everything that you do in your job, day in and day out. You might use a heading entitled friend, and under this heading you would write all the things that you do as a friend. Phone people, visit, write letters, socialize, go out for dinner, meet after work, and so on. If you play sports, put sports as a heading and write down all the physical activities that you engage in. If you are interested in reading, write down all the subjects that you read about on a regular basis.
Set Priorities on Your Roles
When you have completed clustering all your roles and activities into groups, the final step in this exercise is to set priorities on each group. Which group of activities is most important to you? Which group of activities is second most important to you? If you were going to be sent to a desert island for an indefinite term, and you could only take two or three of these activities with you, which ones would they be?
When you have numbered your clusters, or groups, by priority, you will have created a very clear picture of who you are and what is valuable to you in life.
Your next questions might be:
1. What do I need to do in each of these areas in order to get the very most satisfaction and enjoyment from this area?
2. What do I need to do more of or less of?
3. What do I need to get into or get out of?
4. What is more important within each cluster and what is less important?
5. If I had to choose, how would I choose and select among the various things I do?
You will be amazed at the kind of answers you start to come up with. In my experience, you will first be surprised at the clusters that appear at the top of your list, and then by the clusters, some of which take up an enormous amount of your time, that are not really very important to you at all. For you to really know yourself, you have to take the time to analyze yourself like this on paper.
Ask for Input from Others
A second exercise that is very helpful in learning more about yourself, and one that has been a turning point in the lives of many people, is to turn to someone close to you and ask him or her what they think you should do with your life.
Ask a person you trust what he or she thinks are your strong points and your weak points, your strengths and vulnerabilities? What advice would someone who cares about you give to you about the kind of work you should be doing and the kind of talents you should be developing?
Even people who don’t know you very well will often be able to give you insights about yourself and your possibilities that will be extremely accurate and might even be in areas you haven’t even thought about.
Determine What Motivates You
A third method of self-analysis is to apply the work of Dr. David McClelland of Harvard to assessing your own areas of greatest potential.
McClelland developed a method of interviewing people to find out what sort of jobs they would be best at. His conclusion is that people fall into three basic categories. You can usually tell whether a person will be suited to a particular job by finding out whether they fall into one of these three areas.
The method of interviewing, which you can do on yourself, consists of asking the job candidate detailed questions about previous peak experiences or moments of personal pride in his or her past.
The categories were determined by analyzing what most motivates a person. What are the sorts of activities that a person most enjoys and has been most successful at in their previous life and work? There are basically three motivational profiles, and each person falls into one of them, as do you.
1. The Achiever Profile
The first is what is called the achiever profile. The achiever is a person whose greatest sense of accomplishment comes from achieving something that is almost exclusively an individual activity. A person who enjoys climbing a mountain, or completing a course of study, or running a race, or overcoming any obstacle to win through by him- or herself would be classified as an achiever.
There are specific strengths that achievers have and specific jobs that achievers would be best at. One of these would be in the field of selling. Because selling is an individual activity, the people who are the very best at selling are those who most enjoy individual activities and individual
accomplishment.
2. The Leader Profile
The second type of motivation is that of power. A person with a strong power orientation is one who enjoys getting things done through others. Power in this context refers to being able to influence and coordinate the activities of others over a period of time to complete a complex task.
A coach of a sports team or a manager at work who really enjoys what he or she is doing would be a person who is most motivated by this kind of power or influence.
3. The Affiliation Profile
The third kind of motivation is called affiliation. A person with an affiliation motivation is one who most enjoys working harmoniously with other people as part of a team. This person enjoys both supporting others and being supported by others. He or she enjoys cooperating with others toward a common goal and seeing the goal achieved successfully.
Questions to Ask
When you apply this test to yourself, you ask yourself:
1. What do I like to do more than anything else?
2. What have I done in the past that has given me my greatest feelings of self-esteem and
personal pride?
3. What have been my personal peak experiences in life?
Whatever you seem to have enjoyed the most is a good indication of where your strengths lie.
Your strengths may be completely hidden, but by asking yourself these questions and facing the
answers unblinkingly, you will begin to uncover them. When you uncover a potential strength in
yourself and begin to develop it so that you can use it in your life, you begin to feel really terrific
about yourself.
Make a Real Difference
Your most important job is to apply yourself where you can make the greatest positive difference. This will be the area where you get your highest return on energy. When you are working and expanding your capabilities in an area of your greatest strengths, you feel terrific about yourself. You feel like a winner. You enjoy wonderful feelings of self-confidence and self-esteem.
Accept Your Weaknesses
In almost any area, it is also important for your happiness that you develop a proper perspective on the inevitable weaknesses that you may have. Here are some insights that may be helpful to you.
The first insight is that almost every weakness can be viewed as a strength inappropriately applied. If you use one of your strengths where it is neither required nor helpful, it actually can be a weakness if it interferes with your ability to get the result you desire.
Situational Weaknesses
A weakness may simply be situational. There is an old saying, “When you go in the jungle, you must expect the mosquitoes.” Sometimes you will be criticized for the things you do, and you may conclude that you are weak in these areas. However, it may be that criticism just comes with the territory.
You will find that there are inevitable complaints and criticisms that go along with whatever you do. They may not be indicative of a weakness at all, but, rather, merely opinions or observations by another person.
You May Be Hypersensitive
You may have a personality weakness that has been caused by a previous experience. Someone may have taken advantage of you in the past, and you may be hypersensitive to being taken advantage of again in the future. You may have been raised with destructive criticism and have, therefore, developed a very thin skin as a result. The slightest suggestion that a person does not completely approve of your behaviour might cause you to react negatively. This may be seen as a personality flaw or weakness, whereas, in reality it is merely a result of your previous reinforcement history. It may also be something that will be helpful for you to decide to get over.
Amenable to Education
Your weakness may be amenable to education. Often the only thing holding you back from extraordinary accomplishment is a little bit of learning. If you take the right courses, listen to the right audio programs, and read the right books, that may be all that you need to do to become exceptional in your field.
Your supposed weakness may be irrelevant. It may be that someone else expects you to have certain qualities and abilities that you simply don’t have and that you are not interested in or capable of developing. Often the disappointment of others can cause you to feel that you are deficient in some way when, in reality, that particular skill or ability is not important to you anyway.
Weaknesses Are Good Indicators
Finally, what appears as a weakness can be a key indicator of the type of work or activity that you should not be engaging in. It may be that you don’t enjoy that area of endeavour at all. If you try to do a job or task, and you consistently do it poorly, this may be a way of Nature telling you that this is the wrong field for you.
Strengths and Weaknesses
The most important point to remember with regard to your strengths and weaknesses is that everybody has both. There are areas in which you are strong, and there are areas in which you can become extraordinary in your performance. There are areas in which you are weak and you probably should not be spending any more time there than is necessary to assure yourself that you are good enough move ahead.
Take the time to analyze yourself carefully. By practicing self-disclosure, with yourself and others, both in written and spoken form, you will develop a higher level of self-awareness and selfhonesty. As you become more knowledgeable about your strengths, you will become more selfaccepting of whom you really are. As your level of self-acceptance increases and you begin to respect yourself for your unique talents and abilities, your level of self-esteem and self-confidence will go up as well.
When you minimize or downplay your weaknesses and simultaneously identify and maximize your strengths, you will become a peak performer in everything you decide to do.
Action Exercises
1. Decide today that you are going to become very good at what you do, that you are going to join the top 10 percent in your field.
2. Identify the most important skills you have, those skills that are most important to your doing an excellent job.
3. Determine your natural strengths and abilities, those jobs and tasks that you do well and most enjoy.
4. What is your competitive advantage? What is it that you do better than almost anyone else?
What should it be? What could it be in the future?
5. What sort of work motivates you the most? What activities give you the greatest sense of personal satisfaction?
6. In what areas do you achieve your highest return on energy? What do you do that really makes a difference to yourself and your business?
7. Take some time with a pen and paper to complete one or more of the exercises explained in this article so you can be sure that you are doing exactly the right work for you.