3 Ways to Identify & Own Your Strengths
When you’re caught up in your career, having gone from clueless beginner to titled professional, you rarely have time for reflection. All those past moments when you persevered, problem-solved, and succeeded get lost in the crises of today. When you step into leadership, self-doubt can slip into those gaps. Feeling overwhelmed and unprepared for new challenges, it’s easy to forget the strengths that got you there — and that you can use to grow into new levels of authority and expertise.
Knowing and owning your strengths — not just technical skills but how you operate — seems simple on the surface. Make a list, right? But positive self-reflection is a skill we don’t always get to practice and can bring up complicated feelings of worth and shame. There are ways to uncover your strengths as simple facts that provide evidence that they’re real, are a part of who you are, and deserve to be recognized.
Past successes
The stories about your past successes are more complex than the resume bullet you’ve reduced them to. They include how you work independently and as part of a team, decision-making, adapting, creativity, communication, and problem-solving. And they don’t all have to be about wins at work. Any moment you’ve found success has clues to the skills that you lean on when you’re at your best. Those are your strengths.
Think about some of your favorite wins. They don’t have to be the biggest, just the ones you feel the best about. It could be the time you won over a challenging colleague. Making a huge sale. Or creating a family holiday that everyone will remember forever. Try writing the story from when the challenge or goal was first presented through the moment of success. Identify the inner resources you used throughout. Did you adapt your communication style, create a powerful connection, or anticipate and solve for every possible roadblock? To take it a step further, do the same exercise with two more wins to find the strengths that show up most often.
Meaningful feedback
Self-awareness isn’t just knowing about your internal self, it’s also knowing how you’re perceived by others. Performance reviews are often the only clear feedback we receive about the work we do, but everyone your work with — not just your boss — has something to contribute to your self-awareness. Some opinions will be more meaningful to you than others. This exercise is targeted toward the kind of feedback that means the most to you.
Think about the people whose opinions you respect, and who respect you in return — close colleagues, supportive bosses, trusted direct reports, favorite vendors. Reach out to them and tell them you’re doing an exercise to identify your strengths and ask them what they believe your best qualities are and the kinds of things they come to you for help with.
I assign a version of this to coaching clients all the time, and every time they get back kind, insightful responses from anyone who has the time to reply. It’s as though we are all just waiting for the chance to say nothing but nice things to the people we make true connections with at work. Be sure to thank everyone who responds by providing positive feedback in kind.
What comes easily
The things that come most easily to us are what make us extraordinary to other people. But because they seem to require very little effort, we often overlook them as strengths. Reflect on the things you love to do because you know you’ll do it well, or it’s simply fun. Tasks that make your brain happy.
If you’re having trouble coming up with anything, spend a week or two tracking your days. Make a note of any time you were excited, relieved, or confident about a task — leading a meeting, analyzing data, or supporting a peer. Review what you tracked to identify what it is about you that makes that work feel lighter — your facilitating skills, the ability to translate data into stories, being a good listener. Strengths aren’t exclusively called upon during times of stress, they also contribute to what gives you pleasure, satisfaction, and ease.
Owning Your Strengths
Simply declaring you’re good at things can sometimes be tricky. There will always be someone better and more to learn. And there aren’t a lot of opportunities to talk about the attributes that help us be at our best without the fear someone will tell you you’re wrong, or just feeling a little silly. But not being clear on your strengths comes with a cost, not only in self-confidence but in your ability to focus on work that will help you find the kind of success that comes most naturally to you.
The best way to grow confidence in owning your strengths is to practice owning your strengths. Think of them as facts about the skills and traits that best serve you, rather than ego-centric opinions. Then offer your skills to projects where they’ll be most useful. Highlight them in your self-assessment during your annual review. Look for roles where your truest strengths — not just the things you’re capable of — are featured. Use those opportunities to capture more evidence of the value you bring to any situation and feel your confidence grow.
Liza Dube is a career and leadership coach with 20. years of experience as a marketing communications leader across several industries. Using the fundamentals of emotional intelligence, she helps socially-conscious leaders create more compassionate workplaces, starting with themselves.
