Author, Speaker, Mentor

Tag: strengths

Playing to your strengths in 2022

Really do hope you get to have a great break over the Christmas period. Only will you please make sure that you are playing to your strengths in 2022 when setting out the goals for the new year ahead?

Find your flaws and fix them! So many people have been advised to do this. It will keep you challenged, nicely rounded and humble – and it will keep your boss happy! This only tells you what to do with your unique complement of strengths and weaknesses: maintain the former and fix the latter. But, in fact, what people really need to do is play to their strengths and make their weaknesses irrelevant. This really is by far the most effective strategy in living a life of success and happiness. It is so important to discover what you don’t like doing and then stop doing it.
Most people have been brought up in the belief that they will grow and develop most by working on their weaknesses. This is simply not true. You will not grow and develop the most as a human being by focusing on your areas of weakness. The truth is you will learn, grow and develop the least in your areas of weakness. Any learning, growth and development attained will be hard won. This does not change over time – it applies equally regardless of age. It is as true for a ten-year-old as for a sixty-year-old. The fact is you would be far better off investing all your drive, time and focus on your strengths.

What is meant by a ‘personal strength’?
The definition of ‘a strength’ is an activity that makes you feel strong.

Strengths can be found in activities in which you exhibit consistent, near-perfect performance. They are those specific activities at which you do well and for which you still retain a powerful appetite. It feels easy. It feels like you don’t need to try very hard. It feels like an activity that, for some reason, proved quite simple for you to pick up. You learned it quickly. It is something innate that comes from within; something that you find easy to tie into, to use, to grow and to develop. When you are using your strengths, you don’t struggle to concentrate. Instead, you naturally stay focused and time speeds up, and you still feel focused and time speeds up some more.

Strengths can be found in activities that draw you back to them time and again, the activities you can’t help volunteering for. These are where your strengths lie. They are the ones that keep your interest and your concentration with almost no effort; the activities that leave you feeling strong, fulfilled and powerful.

Strengths are not only activities for which you have some natural talent; they are also activities that strengthen you. When using them, you feel powerful, authentic and confident and challenged in the best sense of the word. As such, they are self-reinforcing. Left to their own devices, they will – and must – be expressed.

The most successful people sculpt their life and jobs so they spend a disproportionate amount of time doing what they love. This is no accident. It happens because they stay alert to those activities they don’t like and cut them out as quickly as possible. They do their best to guard the time they can spend doing what they love.
So, will you please make sure that you are playing to your strengths in 2022.

If you want to follow up on what I have written here and living a life of true and real success for you, please check out my books—available from Amazon.

Cover image by Tumisu

Do you want to have more success in your work in 2021?

Do hope you got to have a good Christmas and truly do want to wish you the very best for 2021 and start this year by asking –

Do you want to have more success in your work in 2021?

Well, if have answered yes to this then do please read on.

For the truth is that, as you focus on doing the pieces of the job you enjoy you will have more energy and enthusiasm to achieve the success you do want in your work. Likewise, your willingness to become very good at what you love to do – for its own sake – is crucial to success. In a strange way, for those who stay true to what they love to do, things actually have a knack of turning out better than they imagined they would.

That you feel you are worthy of the success, you want. Successful people do not obsess over what others may think about them and their work. They are more concerned with doing what they love, than with being loved. They have found success that lasts because they have pursued that which matters to them – often at the cost of popularity or recognition. Most people do the opposite: they do things because of their need for approval, popularity or recognition, rather than pursuing what matters to them.

To discover where your strengths lay your strengths and then put them to use in pursuit of doing what you love to do. Believe in yourself and your talents; discover what it is that you are passionate about; pursue your dreams, and do not worry about getting a “good job”. Decide to do only what it is you love to do.

Every decision we make in life comes from either a place of fear or a place of love. Successful people focus on being good at what is meaningful to them, doing things because they matter, and not just doing whatever comes along. They do this despite pressure from society and the risk of being unpopular. They seek out what it is they love to do, and then go and do it. Real success for them is making a difference and creating a lasting impact; it does not mean always-achieving fame, money or power. Equally, making a difference in this great world of ours and making money too is OK: it does not have to be a case of either one or the other. Therefore, having discovered what you love to do, the challenge is to go and do it and this will lead you to the success you want in your work and life.+

Take good care and once again every success and best wishes to you and all yours’ for a great 2021. A year that brings all that you need and more, so much more.

If you do want to follow up on what has been written here and living a life of true and real success for you please check out my books – available from Amazon.

 

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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