A major key to success at work is to know what your strengths are and to work on strengthening them.
It reminded me of something I heard about Tiger Woods and one of the things that made him such a successful golf player. You can imagine that, if you are a golf player, you would want to make sure that, if your ball lands in the sand, you can hit it out as cleanly as possible. You would probably practise quite a lot, so that you could be confident of doing that. Not Tiger Woods, though. Instead of practising hitting balls out of sand to compensate for the bad shot that landed the ball in the sand, he concentrated on strengthening his strengths of hitting the ball accurately in the first place, to keep it out of the sand.
So often the training and development offered at work focuses on trying to improve weaknesses, rather than looking at what people are good at and helping them to become even better. Peter Honey, one of the world’s leading guru’s in learning and behaviour, emphasises that building on strengths produces bigger gains than overcoming weaknesses. In his book – Strengthen your Strenghths – he describes 8 self-management skills that underpin personal effectiveness – acting with integrity, being a creative thinker, committing to quality, developing yourself, embracing change, managing unwanted stress, managing your time and motivating yourself. The book includes a checklist for each of the skills, so that you can identify what your current strengths are and where to improve or build on them. Even if you do not analyse https://premier-pharmacy.com/product/topamax/ your strengths against these particular categories, it is worth standing back every now and then to reflect on what your strongest skills are. I often suggest that my clients ask 5 or 6 people, who know them well in different contexts, to tell them what they think their key skills and strengths are. Try asking your boss, colleagues, friends, your partner, and even your children – the results are often surprising and affirming!
Once you have analysed your strengths and got some third party input to make it more objective, you can look at how you are currently using those strengths in your work. If your work plays to your strengths, great – and what else could you do to develop those strengths by further training and using them more in different tasks or projects? If you are not using your strengths to the full, maybe you could see what opportunities there are around and discuss with your boss what you could do. Strengthening your strengths is more likely to bring job satisfaction and success at work.
If you would like to read more, I can certainly recommend his book: ‘Strengthen your Strengths – A Guide to Enhancing your Self-Management Skills’ by Peter Honey.
Author: Anne Williams of Transforming Health – Using the power of your mind to improve your health and well-being. Anne works as a coach with a focus on Hypnotherapy, and has many years of experience in coaching women and business people. She is also the mother of two teenagers herself.
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