What’s Your Weakness?
In job interviews, a very common question is “What are your strengths and weaknesses?” Perhaps it’s because of questions like these that I’ve tended toward the following dichotomy: my strengths are the things that I’m good at, and my weaknesses are things that I’m bad at. This distinction is ok, but the Human Formation Coalition introduced me to a more resourceful understanding of weaknesses. Weaknesses are whatever you do that gets in the way of your success.
There are at least two reasons why I find this definition interesting:
You need to know what “your success” is. It might be that you’re not a talented public speaker; but this wouldn’t count as a weakness unless it were getting in the way of your particular success. You don’t need to be good at everything, and just because you’re not good at something, doesn’t automatically make it a weakness.
Your top talents and your bottom talents can be weaknesses. Sometimes our greatest gifts are what get in the way of our success. My top CliftonStrengths Talent Theme is Ideation. This means that I am “fascinated by ideas” and “can find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena.” Creating ideas is what comes most easily to me. It also is what gets in the way of my success. I can easily get distracted by lots of good ideas and not take action on them.
This week, I invite you to ask yourself:
In one particular area of my life, what does success look like for me? What are my weaknesses? That is, how do I get in the way of this success? How could I leverage the things I’m best at to make up for my weaknesses?
God bless,
Dan
