Leveraging Your Strengths
by Alan Bernstein, Ph.D.
We are writing this month as cheerleaders! It’s time, finally, to accept ourselves as we are and enjoy our personalities. Let us leave the idea of improvement behind for the moment and bask in the notion that we are good enough. What a concept! And what a relief!
What will you gain through this? You will now be able to concentrate on knowing your strengths and employing them to full advantage. And as cheerleaders, our task is to help you focus your energy in three directions:
1. Identify and understand your strengths. What do you like to do, how do you like to do it, and what do you get out of doing it? In other words, what are the motivations behind your strengths?
As many of our readers know, we favor memories of “flow” as a way to clarify our interests, working style and motivational needs. Flow memories recall times when we were so engaged in tasks that we lost all track of clock time and entered a state of “timeless time.”
Your objective is to create a psychological “base” for yourself by examining how and when you have thrived, in order to give you the confidence and momentum to address your future. Start by remembering two or three situations where you were performing at your best, using all your talents, and were so involved in what you were doing that you lost all sense of time.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Where were you?
- What were you doing?
- Who were you with?
- Were you directing the effort or were you part of a team responding to a challenge? Or were you singularly addressing and resolving a problem?
These “memory exercises” will give you important insights regarding your “motivational needs”. From these memories, you can also deconstruct what your interests are and your style for pursuing them. If you want to go even deeper, you can also use an in-depth “personality profile,” such as the Birkman Method, available through Birkman International (800 215 2760).
2. Use this information to plan your future: Having clarified your strengths, you can now use them in creating a vision for your future. Quoting Frederic Hudson, from LifeLaunch: A Passionate Guide to the Rest of Your Life (The Hudson Institute Press):
“Whenever you consult your life’s compass within you, it points toward the current purpose….Your values, deep energy, and passionate destinations are all wrapped up into one profound sense of purpose, pulling you ahead into more of yourself, through the chapters of your life. That sense of purpose is like a vibrant channel, an illuminated path, a personal calling.”
June 2011