Three Ways to Find Your Strength and Two Tips to Leverage It -018

如何发现和放大自己的优势

Hey, it’s Dr. Liu here with Better LIFE Research TIPS. In the previous video, I said using our strength is the key to have a successful life. However, many people do not spend enough efforts to truly understand what their true strengths are. Some people may know their strength intuitively, but they can not articulate it and thus can not make the best use of it. Today I will show you three ways to find your strength and two tips to leverage it.

The first way is, review your past success. Break down your great wins. Ask yourself what skills you used contribute most to your wins. This may include both hard skills and soft skills which include your personalities. Also, review your best moments of mental flow. Ask yourself what kinds of tasks make you feel most energized. Look for the times that you are eager for a task. Usually one of your strengths is behind it. Who are your role models? What strengths do you admire in them? The idea is, your best strength is usually located at a balance point considering your passion, your skills, and the value they can create. Also, your strengths will make you feel strong and stand out, so when you think or do something differently from most other people around you, pay attention. It may be a hint to one of your strengths.

One game I like to play with my child is called “the box of strengths”. I encourage my child to take notes of their strengths in daily life on small pieces of paper, and put into a box. They may write down whatever they feel they did right or get praised for. For example, they may write “My teacher praised me for my art work, or I helped my friends on something.” After some days, we open the box together, review and classify all the notes. I believe this is great game to help young kids to know their strength and to build a confident character.

The second way to find your strength is, seek feedback from others. When we look at ourselves, we often have blind spots. If you can see yourself through the eyes of others, your vision will be clearer. Notice the feedback you receive in daily life. You may also ask your friends directly what they think your strengths are, what type of tasks they can trust you for. But you’d better be cautious to distinct honest opinion and kind words. Also, you may want to pay more attention to the opinion from those who have management experience. And, when you receive compliments for your achievements, in addition to saying “thank you”, it may be a good idea to initiate a little discussion of your efforts with more details. It may help you to be more clear on how much of the compliments are from politeness, and how much can be treated as the real opinion.

The third way to find your strength is, try new things. The way you react to new challenges will tell you a lot about your strengths. And new experiences can give you more insights on your potentials. You may get some surprises with your new explorations.

Once we have determined our strengths, we want to put it into action. We should create a clear profile on our strength and strategize how we could keep cultivating and utilizing our strengths. The key is to focus on our strength but not our weakness. Keep in mind, the path to greatness is always by enhancing our strength but not by fixing our weakness. Our weakness is like damages in the body of a boat. And our strength is like the sail of the boat. Fixing our weakness can make the boat look better, but only our strength can take us to the place we want. A damaged boat can still sail as long as the damage is not big enough to sink the boat. The real weakness we need to care is the weakness that can affect the utilization of our strength. And most of our weakness can be covered by partnering with others. Focusing on our strength is the most efficient and most rewarding way to develop ourselves, to achieve our goal, and be happy. And here are the two tips to leverage our strength.

The first tips is, exhibit your strength whenever you are networking, and keep helping people using your strength. Whenever you have chance to introduce yourself, you should focus on articulating your strength and offering help to friends in your strength area. Make your strength your name card. For example, you may say, “My name is ABC, but I am known as a XYZ lover. I have spent a lot of time studying XYZ. If you have any needs in the XYZ area, please let know, and I might be helpful.” It will make your self-introduction more impressive. And you want to get continuous feedback. When you can use your strength to help friends, and your performance are always better than 80% of people around you, you will be more confident with your strength. Then you can use it in a larger network. Your strength will be amplified by the network. And you will have more chance to find partners to work with you and cover your weakness.

The second tips is, use the synergy of your strengths. For example, if you have two strengths in two different areas and each strength make you the top 20% in one area. Then if you can find an opportunity that allows you to use both of these two strengths, you will have chance to be the top 4%. If you are strong in teaching history, and you are also good at comics, then when you use comics to teach history, you will have more chance to stand out.

Thanks for watching, I am Dr. Liu with research tips for the underdogs. If you like this video, pleas subscribe for new videos coming every week. Until next time, please ask yourself, can you use 10 seconds to articulate what are your strengths? If not, let’s start to find them for a better and happier life.