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Discover Your Strengths

Discovering your strengths is important because they need to be matched to your chosen career in order for you to be happy and successful in the path you take in your life. You need to be the square peg in the square hole.

What Are Your Strengths?

Your strengths are the things you are naturally good at, and should not be confused with skill or knowledge which are learnt. Your key strengths are what you were born with, your natural abilities, the things you enjoy and what comes naturally to you. These natural strengths are the areas where you have an advantage, and on which you base your path in life.

Your strengths are another aspect of your personality, and strengths can come in many different forms, such as physical, mental, emotional or social. Using your particular strengths as often as you can will help you succeed. Working from your strengths will give you the edge to be more productive, obtain better results, earn more, bring work enjoyment and experience greater fulfillment. Your particular combination of strengths differentiate you from others and reveal how you should spend your life for maximum happiness and success.

Most people have difficulty in listing their strengths but are aware of their weaknesses.This fact often becomes very obvious in a job interview where one of the standard questions is to ask you to list your strengths.You owe it to yourself to know yourself much better than this.

Your strengths are present from an early age and are what careers advice is based upon, however it can be useful to take a proper test to know yourself better and make the most of your life.

Your 43 Strengths (Now, Discover Your Strengths)

Now, Discover Your Strengths, the book by Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton describes 43 possible strengths:

Achiever, activator, adaptability, analytical, arranger, belief, command, communication, competition, connectedness, context, deliberative, developer, discipline, empathy, fairness, focus, futuristic, harmony, ideation, inclusiveness, individualisation, input, intellection, learner, maximiser, positivity, relater, responsibility, restorative, self-assurance, significance, strategic, woo (winning others over). [There is an excellent blog by J.D.Meyer describing this further]

Your 24 Strengths (Positive Psychology)

Positive psychology looks at strengths as being moral character traits which can be developed and you have an active choice whether or not to develop these as distinct from talents which you either have or don't have. You can have strengths of integrity, originality or kindness which you can choose to actively develop. You can have talents of perfect pitch, facial beauty or fast running speed which are not virtues you can choose to develop as they are either there or not there.

The organization of these strengths has been published as a handbook for psychologists to use as a standard reference work to coordinate further studies, called the Character, Strengths and Virtues (CSV) Handbook. It lists the core values of six classes of virtue, made up of twenty-four measurable character strengths as follows:

Wisdom and Knowledge: creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, love of learning , perspective
Courage: bravery, persistence, integrity, vitality
Humanity: love , kindness, social intelligence
Justice: citizenship, fairness, leadership
Temperance: forgiveness and mercy, humility, prudence, self control
Transcendence: appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, hope, humor, spirituality

Other People's Strengths

At home, recognising other people's strengths begins with the recognition of your child's strengths, so that you can encourage and nurture these so that they flourish.

At work, recognising the individual strengths of each team member is the best way to build a successful team, so that each person is doing the work that suits them best. This helps to ensure the success and happiness of each team member in order to can maximise their individual contribution.

Finding other people to work with and network with who have complementary strengths to yours will leverage your success and theirs, because you are then all working from your strengths to complement each other.