How to give of Your BEST..

How much do you know of your ‘strengths’

"Nobody who ever gave his best regretted it." George Halas

Makes sense?

But how does one know that he has given his best?

When I google ‘what is your best’. Guess what was the results?  Strength?

This keeps me wondering for quite a while, does strength = best

Strengths generally is understood as in what we are good in!  Kind of make sense in a way,   I am good at sometimes and of which I give /serve in what I am good in...

  If I am good in numbers,  shall I become an accountant, mathematician, statistician.. etc.  does that mean that I am giving my best?

Are they truly equal, the same?

This brings up a recent conversation with a young man when I asked him what does he want to do with his life,  he said he does not know.  But he knows he is good in number so he thought he SHOULD do something with numbers...  logical?

Knowing one's strengths and weaknesses indeed gives us a better understanding of ourselves and probably how  best we operate.  If you were looking at career options, it definitely could help  to narrow down to some options, won’t you say so?

In according to StrengthProfile, A strength is something we perform well at, is energising and we do often – in summary, it’s our authentic self at our best. When we put our strengths to work, we are happier, more confident, and more able to achieve our goals. We feel motivated to do great work and become engaged and productive individuals, teams, and organisations. When we don’t know what our strengths are, we waste valuable time on things that drain us.​

What do you do say to this?

There are a few types of strength profiling in the market like GallupStrength (executing, influencing, relationship building, strategic thinking themes), StrengthProfile (Being, Communciaiton, Motivating, Relating, Thinking themes) as mentioned above and Value in Action where they will classify the various strengthhs into themes to give the person a better view where their overall strengths lies.   

More importantly, strength profiling extends to unrealised strengths ie what you are passionate, good at it but not use it somehow.  This might be due to lack of opportunities or any other reasons hence not realised or hidden.

The purpose of any of these assessments are meant to give us a better understanding of ourselves.    The greatest challenges come is when your greatest strength turn up to be your greatest weakness

What would you do?

Let me give you an illustration,  let’s say you are a very rational person.    At work,  you don’t get pull into emotional stuff,  it’s always facts and figures right and it served you practically all the time

And because it is such a useful strength, we naturally lean  more and more....   into it

And if you are honest with this strength of yours,  you’ll notice that you have this tendency of approaching all matters from the hyper rational approach which means you are likely to miss personal, emotional, relationship considerations.      If we dig further there is an emotional numbness, intellectual arrogance or aloofness vitality about this strength. 

So much so that the relationship strains the impact of your effectiveness! 

You get the picture!

If we are not careful,  we can overuse our strengths and it can work against us.   Hence the importance of understanding what does the strength truly means to us as an individual, as a leader.    How can I truly embrace it  ie live it not overuse it 

To embrace and not overuse is not only knowing the strength but also has the inner ‘strength’ to resist the overuse because our society dictates what is good and what is bad.  Like the earlier illustration, rational is good especially when we are in a workplace, tendency is we overuse.

When we are able to embrace our full self, we exercise our strength with an understanding of boundary, limitation, ie acceptance of our full self, not pushing ourselves to the point of exhaustion

To embrace your full authenticity,  self awareness is inevitable where we reflect, introspect with the helps of assessments, coaches reflections and most important of all,  the willing (the courage) to be truth to ourselves.

If you find that you are stressing or wondering whether that is your strength,  it is probably time to have that conversation to uncover are you using your weakness or overusing your strength.     Is it time to dial down that overuse strength or find that collaboration with others whose strength are your weakness.