How You Can Focus on Your Strengths

You will always face limiting thoughts, fears and resistance as you go through life, and these can be blockers between you and your success.   Today we are looking at how you can focus on your strengths and use these to reduce the barriers between where you are and where you want to be.

Sadly enough, most people find it hard to push themselves beyond these barriers. Many eventually give up and accept the status quo.  This is not what you want though, is it?  If you want to do and be more, you must face your fears and push yourself beyond your limits. You will be amazed at what you can do!

Look objectively at what you are good at.  Focus on finding a way to spend most of your time within your strengths and less time in the activities that weaken you.

An important step here is a shift in mindset. You need to shift from thinking about your weaknesses to pro-actively working on your strengths.   Of course you’ll want to work on issues that hold you back, but the key point here is that you’ll grow more and be more successful if you work on playing to your strengths instead.

Lets do an exercise which will help here. Go and grab a pen & paper and perhaps put on some music. (If you search for The Daily Authentic Playlist on spotify, you’ll find some cool eclectic background tunes!).

Then ask yourself this question.

What are my core strengths?

What are you good at? You don’t have to think of all the perfect answers right now, just brainstorm a whole lot of things and jot them down. Think of words like resilient, thoughtful, compassionate, strong, astute, assertive, innovative, hard worker, loyal, trustworthy, curious etc.

Once you have a big long list, walk away. Go and spend 5 mins doing something else. Grab a coffee or a drink and come back to your paper, grab a highlighter and mark the words that resonate with you the most. See if you can land on 6 words. These six words describe your strengths.

(Note: Feel free to ask those on your team to do this exercise on your behalf. It’s a real eye opening exercise to see what others think are your strong points…..how different do you think they will be from what you have chosen?).

What Now – where should my focus be?

Once you can identify and understand your strengths, take some time to look at how you can make them part of your everyday routine.  Continuously find ways to spend more time in your strengths, and less time doing what holds you back.

Build strong habits and focus on continual self-improvement.  Small things, done daily, to create lasting change.  Know there is no substitute for hard work.

The story you tell yourself about who you are, is the way you will experience your life. Its a self-fulfilling prophesy. e.g. I’m so bad at this, I never get stuff right, Its always my fault. Try and shift that thinking so it works with your strengths. E.g. I’m a very empathetic person, I’m always a hard worker and I always get the job done, I’m always a loyal friend.

Don’t expect change to come easily and don’t keep living in the past . The goal is to learn and grow.  Don’t wait for the perfect moment – be like Nike (Just Do It!) and learn how you can focus on your strengths.

Never forget how awesome you are.

Just Be You, Everyday

Danni