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Focus on Your Strengths for Greater Wellbeing and Success
by Linda-Ann Stewart
If you're like most people, you probably try to improve on your weaknesses. These are areas where you don't do as well in life. Unfortunately, if they're a weakness for you, you'll never excel at them, because they're not natural for you. You're just able to manage them. One of my weaknesses is making small talk. With a lot of effort, I can hold up my end of that type of conversation, but it's not easy for me.
The Alternative
Instead of working so much on your weaknesses, focus on your strengths. Consider what's right about you, what you do well, and depend more on them. Essentially, you'll be cultivating the best parts of yourself.
When you keep trying to prop up your weaknesses, you're likely self-critical about them and that doesn't help to build you up. But if you highlight your strengths, you feel better about yourself and are more positive overall. When you're clear about your strengths, you're able to utilize them more and be more successful. They also give you a sense of resilience and you start noticing how you use them in your life.
How to Shift Your Focus
To shift your focus from your weaknesses to your strengths, I suggest you make a list of your strengths. These could be positive qualities, such as: optimistic, self-reliant, organized, curious, thoughtful, and so on. List at least two or three of them, if not more. You might even consider the opposite of what you think of a weakness in yourself, especially in specific situations. For me, I began to cultivate a skill I already have that's good for conversations. I'm a good listener.
As you look over your strengths, notice if you don't feel more empowered and good about yourself. You may even feel more grounded and authentic. Contemplate how you've used these traits in your life and how they've helped you. And think of how else you could use them going forward.
Your strengths could give you a new direction to follow that will open doors for you. Doing this exercise can boost your optimism and sense of wellbeing. This isn't to say you won't work on your weaknesses, as I did to learn to make small talk. Just that you shift the majority of your attention to your strengths so that they support your success.
Copyright © 2009-2026 Linda Ann Stewart
All Rights Reserved
As a focus mentor, hypnotherapist, and writer, Linda-Ann Stewart motivates women to focus and transform their business through deliberate actions that break through distraction and overwhelm to greater success, freedom, wellbeing and prosperity. Register for her FREE Design Your Best Day guide and guided meditation at www.Linda-AnnStewart.com/guide.html. You can contact her at LAS@Linda-AnnStewart.com or 928-600-0452.
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