How To Use Your Strengths To Your Advantage: [5 Top Tips]

If you want to understand how to use your strengths to your advantage more effectively, you’ll love this article.

Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. I believe that the majority of individuals put all their time and energy trying to succeed in areas that aren’t their natural strengths. Many of these people then at some point realize how difficult it’s to overcome their weaknesses.

The environment that we live in is a big influential factor that leads us in the wrong direction. We have been taught that the way to succeed is to focus on our weakest areas and try to overcome them.

This results in us devoting most of our time, energy and effort to overcome the weaknesses leaving our strengths virtually untapped.

Look back at a time when you were a student and you were often set work to improve your scores. Any class that you didn’t do well in resulted in additional time to be dedicated to improving this.

Even although you may have outstanding results in other areas, these weren’t celebrated, you were merely told to study harder for your weaker subjects.

The likelihood is that you’re going to have been for one or two interviews in your life. Think about what the interviewers asked you. Rather than focusing on your strengths they most likely asked you more about your weaknesses.

Once you started working, your manager identified the weakest areas in your performance review, stating that these were the areas that needed to be improved.

In order to be productive you need to unlearn this conventional way of doing things and apply new techniques and methods to generate new results, after all it is actually difficult to be productive when you continuously feel frustrated.

Productive people stop doing things that don’t work for them and this is what you need to do.

The company Gallup specialises in research into the behaviors and attitudes of employees, students, customers and folks in general, and the results show that they’ve found those who work on their strengths each day are up to six times more likely to feel engaged in their jobs and three times happier in their life in general.

Advantages of using your strengths:

• • There are many more advantages to be gained by using your strengths such as:
  • You will be happier and more pleased
  • You will engage and focus more on your work
  • You will learn new information faster

• You will enjoy your work
• You will feel an amazing sense of accomplishment

Research suggests that you can never change your core talents. The way your brain cells connect are formed during the first few years of life and the configuration of your mental network with its division of weaker and stronger connections doesn’t change much after your middle teenage years.

This tells us that we shouldn’t waste time trying to change our talents. Instead we should accept our natural talents and turn them into strengths.

By using your strengths to your advantage you can maximize your efforts and multiply the results we get from work.

Your challenge now is to identify what you find easy and what you find harder so that you can begin working on improving your strengths as this is a robust way to increase your productivity.

How to use your strengths to your advantage

The question now is how to find your strengths. In order to answer this you need to observe your own behavior, stay in tune with your feelings and listen to feedback from others.

The following are five really effective ways to help identify your strengths:

1. Observe your behavior

Think back to experiences you had when you were young, and identify what excited you. What activities did you really enjoy?

The likelihood is that when you loved or were excited by something you were using your natural strengths. Write these activities down on a piece of paper and determine why you enjoyed each.

For example, do you love competitions? Do you like to be around others? Your answers will provide you with clues about your innate talents.

Whilst doing this activity, notice how you approach each task. In situations that use your strengths you’ll generally stand out from the crowd. Note any events where you outperformed all others and ask yourself why you did so well.

Another area to assess is your ability to learn something new. If you can learn something new very quickly this might be one of your natural talents.

When you have completed this you should also make a list of things you hated doing in the past and work out why you hated them. This will help you to uncover your weaknesses.

2. Listen to feedback

Getting feedback from others is a very great way to discover your strengths, so make a list of all the people you can trust and ask them for honest feedback with regards to the following:

• What activities do I do best?
• Why do you think that I’m good at these activities?
• What are my unique qualities?
• What are my strengths and abilities?

3. Tools to help identify your strengths

There are several online strength tests (1) which will help you to evaluate your skills, and even though there are numerous tests you can purchase this shouldn’t be necessary as there are numerous respectable tests that are available freed from charge.

4. Use your strengths to your advantage

Once you have discovered your strengths you need to work out how to use them. Look back at the list of priorities you made and consider specific ways to use these strengths with your precedence list.

Once this is completed you’ll reach a productivity level just a few people ever master.

It is not enough to just maximize your strengths in your work; you also need to work on improving them. The more you improve your strengths the more advantages you’ll have in your specialist field.

5. Manage around weaknesses

Now that you understand that focusing on improving your weaknesses is not the best use of your time, ok focusing on weaknesses will stop failure but won’t get you the results however ignoring your weaknesses is a no-no too.

Weaknesses act as stop boards therefore it is actually helpful to know the areas where you lack talent. This way when you see potential problems you can minimize the impact that they’ve.

The following strategies will help you to manage around your weaknesses:

• Stop the activity that weakens you – when you’re doing something that doesn’t play to your strengths ask yourself whether it is important
• Get better at it – if you need a certain talent that you lack, try to improve this weakness
• Other people – get help from someone who excels in the area of your weakness. This means you have more time to focus on using your talents

When you use your strengths and stop focusing on your weakness, your life will improve immensely. You will enjoy your work and be way more productive. If you spend time trying to turn weakness to strengths you won’t ever achieve your full potential (2), so start using your strengths today.

Takeaway Tips

Working on your strengths is the key to staying fully involved in your work, having more satisfaction and increasing productivity.

Keep improving your strengths to provide you with more advantages in your field. Don’t try turning your weaknesses into strengths as they won’t change.

Thank you for reading this article about how to use your strengths to your advantage more effectively and I actually hope that you take action my advice.

I wish you good luck and that I hope its contents have been a good help to you.