On here we talk about becoming the best version of ourselves and chasing our full potential. Today we‘ll discuss one major key to unleashing our full potential and stepping into the best version of ourselves: Discovering our strengths (and weaknesses) and how to nurture them.

 

Understanding your strengths (skills, soft skills, and character traits) and your weak spots gives you a clear picture of yourself and your capabilities. 

 

 

 

Why concentrate on strengths? 

 

This understanding of your capabilities builds the foundation of confidence. Why? Because confidence is a combination of practice and trust in oneself and one’s identity.

It also supports decision-making since aligning decisions with innate qualities leads to achieving success and fulfillment more quickly.

Nurturing your soft skills will increase the quality of your platonic, professional and romantic relationships. 

Leveraging skill on the other hand increases professional productivity and adds job satisfaction. 

 

Your skills and strengths profile makes you authentic and by discovering hidden talents and building them into skills you can build an individual portfolio that impresses in the professional world.

 

 

 

Identifying Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats 

(SWOT-Analysis)

 

A SWOT-Analysis is a powerful tool to explore your skill levels, and external factors/situations. An analysis to identify this current version of yourself as well as the reality you live in. It helps to bridge the gap between the current you and your goals as well as the best version of yourself.

 

Take out a paper and divide it into four sections: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats and fill out the sections accordingly.

 

Strengths: These are any skills or talents you have. Skills you’ve built or things that just come naturally to you.

 

Weaknesses: Crucial skills that you’re lacking or want to acquire, habits that hinder your progress, and any other aspects that hold you back.

 

Opportunities: External factors or situations that can benefit you, and chances to advance to expand horizons and pursue aspirations.

 

Threats: External challenges or risks that affect your progress (obstacles, negative influences, circumstances). Navigate these challenges by acknowledging them and taking preventive actions.

 

Whenever passion and strengths, which are often intertwined, heavily collide it’s a signal that this is a path you should pursue and that can lead to great happiness.

 

On the other side weaknesses you assessed that are crucial to doing well in this world such as financial knowledge, technology basics, etc, should be a focus point for you. These are skills to acquire and knowledge to learn that help your strengths to flourish and overall make your life easier.

 

Explore where your strengths can be leveraged to capitalize on opportunities and where your weaknesses might be vulnerable to threats.

 

 

 

Tips to identify strengths:

 

Reflect on past experiences and how they made you feel. 

When did I feel competent? When did I feel fully engaged? When did I feel fulfilled?

 

Seek feedback from family, friends, and colleagues. They often see you from a different perspective and shed light on things you might have not noticed otherwise. 

 

Engage in various activities that gauge your interest. Try out everything. I even encourage you to engage in activities that you normally would not be interested in. Try something new.

Notice: What makes you lose time? What gives you a sense of accomplishment?

These are the things you should pursue further.

 

Notice recurring themes in your favorite activities and experiences since patterns often show strengths.

 

Embrace challenges and don’t give up too easily. Embracing obstacles and challenges helps uncover hidden strengths and refine existing ones.

 

 

 

You discovered your strengths, now what?

 

Integrate strengths into your goals. Identify where you can leverage your skills to increase the likelihood of achieving your goals. 

 

Cultivate self-awareness. Reflect on how your strengths manifest into your daily life and how you can integrate them in a way to advance in everyday life.

 

Collaborate with people whose skills complement yours. Together you can combine your skills to speed up each other’s progress and achieve success together. Through social media, you can network and reach out to almost anyone. Expand your network outside social media as well.

 

Seek growth opportunities. Never shy away from an opportunity to develop your skill just because you think you’re not capable. You are, it’s just your imposter syndrome talking. Challenges get you farther ahead and allow you to grow and expand to heights you’ve never reached before.