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Written by Chuck Bowen
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Sunday, 20 January 2008 18:00 |
 Unfortunately, most of us choose to focus on compensating for our weaknesses. And, it's completely understandable, since we are often guided by our parents, our teachers, our spouses and our managers to do exactly that. Hence, we never really gain a strong sense of our talents and strengths and therefore they lie dormant and sadly undeveloped. Is it a choice, or inevitable?
I believe it can be our choice - our free will - to build our lives around discovering our talents and building strengths in them vs. becoming experts in our weaknesses and continually repairing them. A talent is your "naturally recurring pattern of thought, feeling, or behavior" (as defined in 'Now, Discover Your Strengths' by Buckingham and Clifton').
Strengths are a combination of Talent, Knowledge and Skill resulting in near perfect performance in an activity. Indeed, it is possible to be talented in an area where you are not yet strong. This can easily happen if you spend your life trying to strengthen yourself in areas you are not gifted, while ignoring those areas in which you truly are.
Working with your talent seems almost effortless; working on a weakness requires much focus and energy. Time and energy focused on developing a talent brings significant improvement; the same investment in developing a weakness brings nominal gain. While we do need to be aware of all our personal characteristics including our weak areas, and work to improve them, I feel we're often misguided in our personal lives, schools and workplaces to become strong by correcting our weaknesses. And in our gut, we know this doesn't work.
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