Identify and assess your strengths
How do I identify and assess my strengths?
Think of strengths as the wide range of building materials you have acquired through a lifetime of experience, practice and learning. These are the materials that you are now going to use to create and fulfill your dream. Different dreams require different strengths.
The most efficient and effective way to get started on your dream is to build upon qualities you already have. None of you would have gotten to this phase of your life without developing a large basket of strengths and skills. It is your task now to look inside your basket and to appreciate how you can use your existing strengths to achieve your dream.
Identify areas to work on
When you have assessed your strengths, you will know which you can use to implement your dream and which others you need to develop. Naming or labelling makes strengths real, gives them value and helps you to understand them better. When you name a strength you are making the invisible visible, the implicit explicit, both to yourself and to others. If you want the dream to happen, you can't rely on serendipity or chance. You have to make it happen.
Excercise: assessing your strengths
A good place to start is with these nine strenghts, selected from the ABCs of strengths, that we believe are useful for all dreams. As you go over this list, jot down if you need to work on this strength, of you have it. Keeping a diary with examples may help you sort it out.
The nine strengths:
• Self-acceptance
• Tenacity
• Regulation
• Efficacy
• Navigational skills (your ability to make, and follow through, with a plan)
• Goodness-of-fit (is your personality suited to your dream?)
• Timing
• Humour
• Spiritedness
While we recognize and acknowledge that everyone has weaknesses or deficiencies, we focus on capitalizing and strengthening existing attitudes, building blocks and competencies. You have to be aware of your weaknesses and alert to how these may sabotage, limit and undermine your efforts to move forward. One important strength is learning to manage them.
Everything in context
Each of the strengths in the table is present in every person, but in varying degrees. A particular strength may vary depending on what you are doing and what is important to you at a given time. Some of you will be more tenacious than others -- and some of you are more tenacious in certain activities than others. Consider the two of us authors: one of us (Laurie) can cook for hours but has little patience for reading a business plan. The other of us (that'd be Deanna) is the first to admit her patience for cooking is limited to minutes, but she can spend hours analysing a business plan. We are both tenacious, but our tenacity varies according to our interests.
So how can you work on your strengths to realize your dreams? There are four basic routes to follow: educate yourself, observe others, allow yourself to be coached and practise your strengths. As Henry David Thoreau said, “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.
"Live the life you've imagined.”
Adapted from Dreams Have No Expiry Date: A Practical and Inspirational Way for Women to Take Charge of Their Futures by Laurie Gottlieb, PhD, and Deanna Rosenswig, MBA. Copyright 2005 Laurie Gottlieb and Deanna Rosenswig. Published by Random House Canada. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
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