Let’s be honest: whether we want to admit it or not, there are many things in life that we aren’t good at doing. Even so, it’s not easy to embrace your weaknesses and accept the fact that there are some things you aren’t good at.
Working on your weaknesses can yield amazing results. For instance, low self-confidence might be hindering your ability to attain success and happiness. In this case, focusing on that particular weakness and taking full responsibility for it would produce several positive changes. It would likely unveil hidden potential and create significant momentum in your life.
Fully embracing your weaknesses is the only way to work on them. Doing so allows you to make positive changes in your life and creates opportunities for growth. Will you make peace with your weaknesses or will you work to only conceal them? Regardless of your choice, fully acknowledging them is the first step.
In her excellent overview, Ilona Boniwell discusses two important underpinnings of positive psychology. First, we cannot be competent at everything. Competence is generally a reflection of our strengths and how we employ those. Second, our greatest opportunities for growth lie in expanding our strengths, rather than developing areas of weakness. When we peruse influential readings within positive psychology, a great number focus on the cultivation of social, emotional, and cognitive strengths.
So what are we to do with our weaknesses? Boniwell explains that success comes from managing our vulnerabilities, not eradicating them. Indeed, in over-developing areas of strength, we can create fresh vulnerabilities. Consider, for example, situations in which an over reliance on directive leadership skills can lead managers to fail to listen to and engage employees.
A risk of becoming exuberantly strengths-focused is that our weaknesses become a kind of dark side that we hope to sweep aside and overcome. In their book The Upside of Your Dark Side, Kashdan and Biswas-Diener cite intriguing evidence that negative experience can be essential to success. For example, the frustration, anger, and disappointment of failure can become powerful prods to fresh efforts at mastery. Indeed, the entire concept of resilience speaks to the idea that our growth often comes from our most adverse experience.
The idea that our dark sides represent light unable to break through opens the door to new ways of “managing” our weaknesses. Instead of viewing weaknesses as problems to be minimized and worked around, we can view our vulnerabilities as a function of unfulfilled strengths. Once we can make the most of who we are and express the full range of our strengths, we naturally bypass what had appeared as shortcomings.
What is your greatest weakness? What interests, values, and strengths may be coming to the surface when those vulnerabilities appear?
There’s strength in being strong enough to admit your weaknesses. After all, we all have areas in which we excel, and others in which we could use a little work.
If you can commit to personal growth so that you can strengthen your weaknesses, it can make you a more well-rounded individual and more diligent worker. This can have incredible effects on your career.
To be clear, working on strengthening your weaknesses doesn’t mean you’re pursuing perfection, nor does it require undue self-criticism. Rather, it’s a challenge that people can embrace as a productive self-improvement project that will help them overcome bad habits or tendencies that could be holding them back from reaching their full potential.
