My previous post referenced why playing to your strengths makes sense. But what exactly constitutes a strength? And how do you find what your real strengths are?

What is a strength?

Firstly, it’s important to remember that your strengths are not necessarily limited to your skill-set. You may have attained a high level of competence in a particular area of work but it may not be something you’re particularly passionate about.

Strengths are activities which you love doing and which you’re especially good at. It’s those tasks which leave you feeling energised and you actively look forward to doing them. And when you’re doing them you’re completely absorbed in and connected to the task at hand.

Sir Ken Robinson, in his book “The Element” describes strengths as aptitudes intersecting with passion.

In summary, strengths could be described as:

Talent + Aptitude + Practice = Skill
&
Skill + Passion = Strength

How do you find your strengths?

A powerful tool called the Reflected best self (RBS) was developed to help individuals tap into unrecognised and unexplored areas of potential.
The RBS exercise is broken down as follows:

1. Ask for feedback: Ask people inside and out of work for information about what they perceive as your strengths and specific occasions when they’ve observed you using them.
2. Find patterns: From the feedback received and your own observations look for common themes e.g. do people tend to comment that you’re excellent at engaging with people etc
3. Self-portrait: Write a description of yourself that summarises the collated information; it should start with “When I am at my best, I…”. Writing this gives a more in depth understanding of what your strengths are.
4. Redesign your job: What incremental changes can you make in how your work and spend your time so that you get to do more of what you’re really good at.

Marcus Buckingham (author of “Go Put Your Strengths to Work” )suggests over the course of a week noting down very precisely the activities which you love doing and how you feel as you’re doing them (e.g. engaged, absorbed, happy, time flies etc) and those that you really don’t like doing. It’s important to write down the activities as you are doing them as this will more accurately reveal your true feelings.
At the end of the week you’ll have a list of the activities that you were very happily and completely engaged by and the activities that drained you and felt like an uphill struggle. Selecting two or three activities from the “Love it” side that really resonate with you will give you a clear picture of what your strengths are. Being clear about your strengths helps you gravitate towards doing more of those activities that you really enjoy and energises you so that you can power through those activities you dislike.

So, it’s worthwhile taking some time and getting really clear on what your strengths are and how you can apply them.

And the final word goes to Sir Ken; “we need to encourage people to reconnect with their authentic talent… It’s accepted that there’s a crisis of natural resources, but I argue that there is also a crisis of human resources. Most people simply don’t discover what they’re capable of.”

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