How to identify your personal strengths

A collection of the best advice and research I’ve seen

 
Perhaps the most common approach to finding a good career is to identify your personal strengths, and then look for paths that match them.

This article summarises the best advice I’ve found on how to identify your strengths, turned into a three-step process. It also includes lists of personal strengths that are most commonly used by researchers (to give you a language to describe your own) and a case study.

But first, I wanted to give a warning that I think the ‘match with strengths’ approach to choosing a career seems a little overrated.

Perhaps the biggest risk is limiting yourself based on your current strengths, and ignoring your potential to develop new, more potent strengths. This risk is most pressing for younger people, who don’t yet have much data on what they’re good at – making them more likely to guess incorrectly – and have decades ahead of them to develop new strengths.

You should ask both ‘what are my strengths?’ and also ‘which strengths are worth building?’

More broadly, I’ve argued that it’s often better to take the reverse approach to match with strengths: ask what the world most needs and then figure out how you might best help with that. This orientation helps you to focus on developing skills that are both valued in the market and that can be used to solve important global problems, which is key to finding a career that’s both meaningful and personally rewarding.

I also think the main reason to ‘focus on your strengths’ is to find something you might be great at in the long term, and I don’t think simple ‘match with strengths’ is obviously the best way of predicting that.¹

With those caveats in mind, I still think that clarifying your strengths is one useful input into career planning — especially after you’ve had a couple of jobs — and that there are better ways to do it than the norm.

For instance, I’ve noticed that people often think of their strengths in an overly abstract way. Michelle, who’s one of our advisors, thought of herself as introverted, so she didn’t think she’d be a good fit for the job. But when she considered what it involved on a more granular level — one-on-one conversations about doing good — she realised this work matched her strengths after all.

These exercises are also useful even if you’re not currently in the middle of a job search. Finding ways to spend more time using your strengths can also make your current job more satisfying (I’ve found the ‘energy audit’ covered in Step 2 especially useful, both for myself and those I work with.)

Negativity bias means we usually focus most on our weaknesses, but most people seem to agree that building a successful career is more about capitalising on your strengths than improving your weaknesses. (Areas of weakness should be brought up to the minimum level needed, simply avoided, or overcome by working with people who are strong where you’re weak.)

Being able to explain your strengths to others is also vital in job interviews and promotions, and these exercises can help with that too.

Finally, assessing your strengths is one of the steps in our full career planning process — so if you’ve been meaning to plan your career, this could be a good jumping-off point.

 
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Πηγή: 80000hours.org