For most of my life, I felt the need to bolster my weaknesses. After all, that’s what you are told to do, right? Work on strengthen the areas of you life or work in which you are not as proficient or adept.
Then I was at a conference and heard a speaker tell me to do something quite different: Focus on my strengths.
Focusing on your strengths and enhancing those qualities that make you outstanding already make so much more sense. After all, it is these characteristics that help you succeed.
I’m not saying that your weakness don’t hold you back. Strengthening them can help you succeed. In other cases, however, you can outsource activities or tasks that require you to do something you aren’t good at to someone else. That allows you to focus on what you do best.
Don’t Stop Learning and Growing
I am not advocating that you stop learning and growing. If you do that, you will lose your passion for life and work. You will grow stagnant, and that won’t help you succeed.
I am advocating that you look at yourself and evaluate what weaknesses you have that don’t deserve your attention. If you are messy, you can hire a housekeeper or an organizer to come in on a regular basis. If you aren’t good at technology, you can hire people who are to do those jobs for you—in half the time. If you aren’t good at your finances, you can hire an accountant or QuickBooks expert.
Plus, focusing on what you don’t do well never helps your selfconfidence, sense of selfworth or ability to succeed. Placing your attention on your “flaws” often just makes them worse.
Focus on What You Do Best
Once you do so, you free up your time and energy to focus on what you do best. That’s when your results skyrocket!
It doesn’t help you move closer to your goals if you spend most of your time trying to get better at things that simply aren’t part of your character or personal makeup. If you don’t enjoy those tasks, you also will find yourself resenting them and not making effective progress.
Free Your Mind to Do Your Best Work
For the last year, I’ve been trying to delegate to others more of the things I don’t do well or don’t like to do. Doing so has not only freed up my time, it has freed up my mind. I can place my attention on the things I enjoy, feel passionate about, and am interested in—as well as the things I’m good at doing. When I don’t have a mind cluttered with thoughts about jobs I don’t feel comfortable doing or don’t want to do—when I know they are taken care of by someone more adept than myself—my mind can focus on the bigger issues or more important projects. I free my mind, and that makes me more creative and more productive.
So stop worrying about and focusing on your weaknesses. Instead focus on your strengths and see how far and how fast they take you where you want to go.
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It makes sense not to worry too much about your weaknesses. We all have them. We will always have them. We will never be without flaws and there will never be a PERFECT time to do anything. Until we accept that we will NEVER be perfect but act anyway to achieve what we can with what resources are at our disposal, then we will achieve nothing. That said, I also agree that our weaknesses should not be left alone so much that they curb our ability to achieve great things. But if we make our weaknesses the center of attention, we will never take even a single step forward.
True, Jay. We can’t ignore the weaknesses, but we will accomplish more when focused on the strengths.