Headed for the Big Leagues!
Addressing the maintenance issues in our lives frees us up to move to the big leagues, to tackle the real issues that get in our way. No longer majoring in minors, we can focus on areas that have the greatest impact on our future.
Let’s get a few things clear before we tackle these bigger issues. If you are not sure what the minors are, those basic maintenance items that we let get in the way of our performance, then read this. The minors are not weaknesses.
A weakness as defined by Merriam Webster is a quality or feature that prevents someone or something from being effective or useful. If we leave it at that definition, we are all stuck. I have plenty of qualities or features that prevent me from being effective and useful. Place me in a hospital emergency room and I will quickly be ineffective and useless, causing more problems as I fall faint onto the floor.
You are reading this because you want to excel and become better at what you do professionally. At some level you recognize where your talents serve you. When we address weakness in this environment we mean anything that gets in the way of excellent performance. No need to worry about the emergency room! I will certainly not be there attempting to perform.
Now that we are clear that a weakness means a hampering of our ability to perform in an arena we are capable of performing in we can move on to addressing it (or them!)
The first step in addressing weaknesses is to identify them. You may already know a few of them from experience. Perhaps you have challenges performing when it comes to administrative issues. Perhaps it is dealing with team members and employees. Perhaps it is closing the deal. Whatever it is, awareness is the first step. Make a list!
To get a true picture of areas of weakness it may help to first identify natural strengths. What are you really great at? Make a list.
It is a much shorter list isn’t it? Ouch. How could I possibly excel with all these weaknesses to overcome?
The mind finds it far easier to focus on the negative than on the positive so get some reinforcements in there. Take the CliftonStrengths® assessment (what a great name!) and refine that list of strengths. You may find that you are misidentifying strengths as weaknesses and wouldn’t that be unfortunate?