Day 7: Discover Your Strengths & Weaknesses

Today you will learn what strengths and weaknesses are, why discovering your them is important for developing a purpose, and the how to process for uncovering your them and improving them.

Summary

What are Strengths & Weaknesses?

Strengths and weaknesses are the highs and lows of your unique makeup of skills and abilities resulting in advantages and disadvantages in some areas over others.

• Each person's unique jagged profile of strengths and weaknesses indicates that each person has a unique potential for excellence.
• Differences in jagged profiles suggests that that person should take different type of strategies suited for their own strengths.
• Your potential for excellence ultimately depends on the full pattern of mental abilities and skills.

Your job is to identify your strengths and weaknesses and looking for the environments that will be the best fit.

• A particular attribute may be a strength in one environment while that same attribute may be a weakness in another environment.
• Nature has done nothing wrong by making you different than others. In fact, this is how it ensures our survival because as the environment changes, nature needs to test out all these different capabilities and skills to see which one is gonna fit the best in the new environment.

Why are Strengths & Weaknesses important to purpose?

Your purpose will require every ounce of your abilities, so you will need to focus on training both strengths and weaknesses.

• Knowing your weaknesses identifies the areas you can train to get better so that even at your worst, you're performing very highly.
• Knowing your strengths helps you intrinsic motivators of autonomy and mastery, resulting in greater confidence, focus, and engagement, which combine to increase learning and foster flow.

How to discover your Strength & Weaknesses

First Area of S&W's: Personality

• The previous lesson examined your faults and virtues. Return to these and identify in what circumstances these personality traits my be strengths and when they will be weaknesses.
• Further your understanding with the VIA Institute on Character's Strength Survey which will provide a wealth of information to help you understand your best qualities across the top 24 character traits.

Second Area of S&W's: Academic

• Take online assessments in academic subjects like math, writing, reading, etc to provide benchmarks for improvement when you find the right learning resources to help you improve.

Third Area of S&W's: Skills

• Skills are the technical sets of knowledge, actions and behaviors that you would need to perform in order to create something related to your interests like programming, negotiations, photography, or starting a podcast for example.
• One way to assess these are through skill assessments related to that particular skill to provide a benchmark on performance of that skillset.
• Another is to try out different experiences that use that skill and subjectively assess for yourself how well you did and where you can improve.

Exercise: Examining Your 5 Biggest Wins & Failures

• Write down the 5 biggest successes in your life. Examine each, detailing the strengths that helped you to achieve this victory. Be as specific as possible in describing the strength.
• Write down the 5 biggest failures in your life. Examine each, detailing the weaknesses on your part that may have led to those failures. Be as specific as possible in describing the weakness.

Exercise: Ask Others About Our Top Strengths & Weaknesses

• Ask at least 5 people to describe your top 3 strengths and top 3 weaknesses. Again, the more detailed the better. So ask follow-up and clarifying questions to their responses if they are comfortable elaborating.

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Activity

Reflect on which areas of yourself you need more knowledge about your strengths and weaknesses including your personality, academic capabilities, and skills related to your interests. Take assessments related to those areas.

Then complete the exercises of examining your 5 biggest wins & failures and asking others about your top strengths and weaknesses.

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.