Play to Your Strengths and Work on Your Weaknesses

It’s safe to play to our strengths and it makes good business sense but sometimes it’s all too easy to hide behind our strengths and shy away from looking at our weaknesses. But we can only be as strong as our weakest link and it’s in strengthening those areas where you can find huge leaps in performance and success.

It’s appealing to keep putting our energy into getting better at what we’re already good at. It’s fun, rewarding and ultimately it’s safe because we’re good at it. Working on our weaknesses can be tough and, in the short term, unrewarding and not much fun because, of course, we’re not very good at it.

The wise, brave and bold attack they’re weaknesses head on whilst playing to their strengths.

Today is a short blog to tell you the difference between playing to your strengths and hiding from your weaknesses.

They are two very separate things, one of them I actually think is a pretty positive strategy and that is to play to your strengths. Find out what it is that you’re good at or what your business is good at and play to those strengths. Market to those strengths, create products around those strengths, live your life behind those strengths. However quite often people tend to hide behind their strengths and they hide from their weaknesses.

The truth of the matter is that quite often your greatest gains in life and the greatest gains in your business are going to come from looking at those areas of yourself and your business that are the weakest, however sometimes this can take a lot of bravery to dare to look at them, let alone try and fix them. Quite often if I find an entrepreneur that’s brilliant at marketing, they tend to do tons and tons of marketing.

They’re really good at it and they enjoy it. Which came first doesn’t matter. It’s like a bicycle sometimes, they enjoy as they get good at it or they’re good at it so they enjoy it, and they tend to hide behind their marketing. They do loads and loads and loads of marketing, but maybe they’re not doing other aspects of the business that really need doing, because they consider them to be boring or they don’t enjoy them or they’re not very good at it.

Now of course you can get an amount of success by keep playing to your strengths, however you’re always going to be held back by those weaknesses. So one of the things that I dare people to do is to look at their own weaknesses. This could be a weakness in your business, it could be a weakness in your business practise, it can be in your systems, your methodologies, and it could be a weak link in terms of one of your staff members.

It could also be a weak link in you, it could be a part of your mind set or your attitude that’s the weakest link within you, and sometimes we hide from that, we don’t want to look at that – it’s uncomfortable, we don’t want to work on those things because that’s where the hard work is. I’d rather keep doing this stuff that I’m really enjoying and that I’m good at, and that is giving me a pretty good result, but I want you to remember that a chain can only be as strong as its weakest link.

So if you’ve got loads of really strong links and there’s a weak link, you can’t load that chain up fully the way you’d want to, it’s going to give. If we strengthen that one link up, now our overall chain can bear a much greater load. It’s the same for our psychology, our own mind set, our own attitude and for our business and our teams and everything else. So definitely play at your strengths, I think it’s a great strategy, however not to the exclusion of hiding from your weaknesses.

Be brave, be bold, look for them and dare to tackle them, and work on them. That’s what I do when it’s about developing the mind set for success. It’s about capitalising on the stuff that’s really working for you, but daring to be brave enough to look at the stuff that’s holding us back. If we can strengthen that then we can almost catapult ourselves forward in terms of that success. So bear that in mind, play to your strengths, but please do not hide from your weaknesses.

Until next time, be successful.