Leveraging Personal Strengths for Growth

Leveraging Personal Strengths for Growth

Michelle Matthias

What does it mean to leverage your strengths?

Leveraging your strengths means using what you are personally good at to get more of what you want. (As for how to use them, what they are, well that is a little more complicated.)

I would like to place some emphasis on the word ‘strengths’ because while growing up I was pushed to place more effort in the areas where I was weak as opposed to giving more attention to the things that I was naturally good at and preferred doing. I am not saying that the concept is wrong. It is good to challenge yourself and broaden your repertoire but in this blog, my focus is on leveraging our strengths, talents, skills, and abilities to maximize our growth. It’s identifying what you are good at and becoming a master at it while utilizing other people’s help in areas where they are better than us.

It is a fact that everyone will experience varying degrees of success and failure during their life. Sometimes, the process of accomplishing and making it to the top can be a jaded walk. One in which you take a few steps forward and more than a few backward, much to your dismay.

So the question is: How can I maximize and increase my growth potential and elevate my chances to succeed?

The key factor is identifying and leveraging your personal strengths.

You may not know what your personal strengths are, so how are you to go about leveraging them?

You first need to pinpoint your strengths and can do so by following these tips:

• Get to know Yourself. What are you good at? What are your skillsets, strengths, weaknesses? What concrete skills and abilities do you have? What areas do you excel in and what are your weak areas?

• Turn to a Friend/Family. Ask someone who you trust to tell you what are some things they know that you are really good at/your strengths. In some cases, others know you better than you know yourself. Our friends/family have the inside scoop. They know our personality and are often equipped to help us identify our strengths and weaknesses because they have a valuable outsider perspective.

• It’s probably a good idea to take your own self-assessment, and compare it to your friend/family assessment of you. If there are overlaps, great, if not perhaps you need to scrutinize either your own self-assessment or your friend/family assessment and see if the truth lies somewhere in between the two.

• If you still don’t trust the results from the above then you can look into taking a “strength test.” These are designed to help users identify their own strengths with the idea that our own individual biases could have an impact on how we evaluate our own strengths. The test is implemented to help erase those biases.

The idea of leveraging your personal strengths in order to maximize your growth is one that we should all consider and aim to pursue. It’s difficult not to be fulfilled using our natural gifts. Part of leveraging is investing in and developing those strengths/gifts. This requires action. If you’re not doing something with your skills and your knowledge, it becomes useless, it stagnates, and you start to feel bad about yourself.

What are you good at? How about becoming better at it?

If you are ready to identify and leverage your strengths, remember that success does not happen overnight. You as an individual have to work hard to identify your strengths and then work out a way in which to leverage them to your overall benefit and growth. It takes time, so be patient.

Leveraging your strengths means using what you are personally good at to get more of what you want.   – Michelle Matthias