Compliments of the season to you and happy holidays!

How is your holiday? I hope you’re resting, visiting loved ones, enjoying carnivals, and having a great time.

Rest is good, and it’s essential to recharge during the holidays.

I’m a strong advocate of rest.

Get enough rest this holiday. While you rest, feed your mind with positive, inspiring things.

What do I mean by the right things?

Things that will inspire you to become a better person—a better leader, professional, parent, or friend.

Avoid things that drain you (avoid them like a plague).

Avoid things that leave you drained and demotivated.

Instead, prioritise what feeds your strengths and starves your weaknesses.

We all have weaknesses, but one of the most effective ways to manage them is by investing more in our strengths.

Building on this idea, here’s why investing in your strengths especially matters for leaders.

Invest In Your Strengths, But Don’t Ignore Your Weaknesses

It’s natural to focus on weaknesses, but investing in strengths can also help improve them.

Know your strengths. You discover them through active leadership. By stepping out, you discover where you are weak and identify your strengths—things you do easily and that yield good results.

Once you find your strength, invest in it. You’ll set yourself apart and achieve more in your field.

So, invest in your strengths, but don’t ignore your weaknesses. Use your strengths to improve them.

People often accept their weaknesses once they are identified.

They nurture these weaknesses, unknowingly allowing them to grow until they affect other areas of their lives.

You shouldn’t accept that you’ve low self-confidence.

You shouldn’t accept that you’re financially illiterate.  

You shouldn’t accept that you’re a coward.

You shouldn’t accept that you’re lazy.

Tolerating weaknesses as leaders lets them harm even our strong areas over time.

Keep working on your strengths, but also address your weaknesses. Remember, most can be improved, and some can even be eliminated.

How To Invest In Your Strengths

First, Discover Your Strength. You Can’t Invest In What You Don’t Know

Start with self-awareness, then self-discovery—understand what you do well and what comes easily to you.

Strengths—things we enjoy doing with little effort and less stress that produce meaningful results/outcomes.

Self-discovery leads to self-mastery, in which you understand and skillfully leverage your strengths.  

Self Awareness

Self Discovery

Self Mastery

Self-awareness is a broad topic and can’t be covered in a few sentences.

Self-awareness basically means just paying attention to yourself.

We can get lost in life and just wander through without even knowing who we truly are.

Self-awareness shifts your focus back to yourself.

You must know yourself to do what you are built to do.

We’re natural beings, and each one of us comes with very unique configurations.

It’s amazing when you actually think about it.

Our brains work differently, and we experience the world differently—factors like religion, country, culture, tradition, technology, sickness, etc., all profoundly influence who we are.

Self-awareness means realising you are unique, not just ordinary.

You begin to understand purpose and see yourself as important, not just matter.

It’s a mindset shift that propels you into realities you would never have known existed if you’d just been absorbed in living life like another floating blurb.

Then comes self-discovery. Now, you’re aware of your beautiful self. The fog of life has cleared from your minds, and now you see yourself as an important piece in the whole equation.

Self-discovery is the process of exploring yourself.

There’s much you don’t know you can do. Self-awareness opens your mind; self-discovery is the journey to uncover hidden talents.

Self-mastery means knowing how to use your discovered abilities.

The Place Of Talents And Gifts

People who have discovered their talents are advanced in self-discovery. Recognising a talent means you’ve moved beyond self-awareness to discovery.

Our talents and gifts are clear indicators of our strengths! If you want to know what you are really good at, start looking at your talents and gifts, and don’t start with that condescending statement of “I don’t even have a gift or talent.” People who speak like this are already putting their minds behind iron bars.

You’ve gifts, and you’ve talents—because you haven’t seen them yet doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Learning The Right Things

Discovering your strengths is a big part of the whole process. It provides you with a map and a destination. You now know what you’re working on. The next step you need to take is learning the right things. There are things you must learn that will improve your strengths.

If you were, let’s say, gifted with the arts, directing all your resources into learning how to code wouldn’t be of much benefit to you, and if you were gifted with the ability to appreciate figures and numbers, it would only be wise if more of the things you learn were related to your ability.

I am not saying you should be insular or blindly focused on one thing. What I am insinuating, in essence, is that you pour more into the things that relate directly to your strengths.

You can still appreciate other things; in fact, I think it’s even more rewarding if we could expand our horizons and appreciate more things in life, it gives us a kind of creative bank to draw from when creating.

Don’t waste your time learning the wrong things. Learning the wrong things is investing in the wrong things, and bad investments don’t produce productive results.

So, once you’ve succeeded in discovering your abilities—what we call strengths—the next step is to learn everything you can that directly relates to your strengths.

It’s all out there; you just need to go for it and be disciplined enough to sit down and absorb all that you can learn.

A course? A diploma? A specialised mentorship or coaching? An academic qualification? Go for it!

The Right Community

While you’re learning the right things, another significant way to invest in your strength is to ensure you’re in the right community. Your community is your tribe, your clan, a small bunch of people who look like you, think like you, and understand your strengths and weaknesses.

The right community supports your growth. A poor environment limits even the ambitious.

Being around people who don’t know you makes things harder, unless you’re highly self-motivated.

The Right People

It could be tough finding your clan. You are not born into them; you discover them. You search for them, and when you see them, you’ll know. Because it will click. If you are an entrepreneur, you should be looking for entrepreneurs. If you want to become an academic, let your closest friends be scholars and fellow academics. Again, I am not saying you should chase away other types of people. We can learn from anybody and anything. What I am saying is that keep your tribe closest to you; they are the ones who understand you deeply enough to stay with you around the fire.

Doing The Right Things

Now, you must be doing the right things. This is very important. Tools are designed for very specific purposes, and the only way for us to know how effective they are is to use them for those purposes.

Take your skills, your talents and your strengths to the right places and do the right things, do things that relate to your strengths, always, and anytime you’ve the opportunity, this is the ultimate way to evaluate how sharp and effective you are, and it also reveals areas where you need to improve.  

Even if you need to volunteer or work for free, do it!

Plenty Of Action!

Plenty of action is how we get better at anything. In clinical practice—any form of clinical practice, whether you’re a surgeon, nurse, med lab scientist, or whatever you are, the moment you stay away from active practice for a long time, those skills will naturally become blunt and when or if you decide to come back, you would definitely need to re-learn a lot of things before you become practically effective again.

Always seek out opportunities to use your strengths or skills. This is how you sharpen them.

There you have it—a summary of how to invest in your strength.

• Discover Them
• Learn The Right Things
• Associate With The Right Community, The Right People (find your clan, your tribe)
• Do The Right Things

If You’re Good At Something, You Can Also Be The Best!

There’s no limit to improvement, growth and mastery.

Most settle after some growth, but top achievers go further to master their field. There’s always something new to add, something new to learn and a new mile to cover.

If you’re good at something, commit today to becoming the best at it.

What’s hindering you from becoming the best?

So start pushing past those limits—take full responsibility and move forward now!

You are the only factor that can stop you.

When I discovered this truth, I stopped making excuses, and whenever I fell short of anything, instead of blaming anybody or anything, I first looked inwards and asked myself, “What would I have done differently to produce the desired result/outcome?”

Approaching Weaknesses The Strength Way

Have you ever taken a critical look at the things called weaknesses in your life?

Either as a person, a professional or a leader.

What are those things you call weaknesses in your life?

Disorganisation

Impatience

Insecure

Laziness

Procrastination

Imposter Syndrome

Self Criticism

Lying

Lack of Self-Confidence

Lack of Self-Control

Poor Health and Care Habits (excessive alcohol use, smoking, etc.)

Name them, the list is endless!

Do you know that all of these things can be changed?

None of us was born insecure, lazy or with low self-confidence or self-esteem.

These things gradually crept into our lives as we began to absorb the culture around us, and as we allowed them to stay in our minds, they became strongholds.

You can deal with procrastination. You can expel laziness from your life.

Anyone who accommodates weaknesses in their lives is doing so because:

They don’t know they can expunge weaknesses from their lives, or they are being lazy, nonchalant or lackadaisical about it.

That’s the truth.

You can build your weaknesses up into strengths if you approach them the strength way. In the same way we invest in our strengths, if we do so with our weaknesses, we would begin to discover that the things we call weaknesses can surprisingly evolve into strengths too.

So, how do we deal with our weaknesses?

The same way we invest in our strengths.

• Discover Them: Same process of self-awareness. Self-awareness doesn’t just uncover the areas you are strong in; it also reveals your weaknesses. As you become self-aware of your weaknesses, you now go on to discover that weakness—understanding it, and knowing why it’s there in the first place. For most, some weaknesses are seated deep in emotional and psychological reactions that would need expert attention, like most people who procrastinate may be suffering from ADHD or may have some form of dyslexia. In self-mastery, instead of mastering the weakness the wrong way, you starve it of nutrients!  What are the things you do every day that make it easy for that weakness to remain strong? Too much of social media? Consuming too much junk food, wasting too much time on movies? There’s always something that feeds weaknesses, just the way there are things that feed strengths.

• Learn The Right Things: It’s a two-sided coin. The same methods we employ to strengthen our strengths are the same we use to weaken our weaknesses until they vanish. There are skills we can learn to effectively address weaknesses in our lives.

• Associate With The Right Community, The Right People (find your clan, your tribe): Staying with hard-working people will naturally begin to erode the thick walls of laziness that have grown around your life. Walking with people who are wise will naturally help you learn wisdom and starve foolishness in your life. If you are a lazy person and decide to live among the lazy, in no time, that laziness will kill you. The law of association.

• Do The Right Things: Avoid engaging in things that arouse your weaknesses; instead, do things that challenge them and turn them into strengths. Are you afraid of public speaking? Then start doing public speaking. Run towards things that your weaknesses drag you away from. Oh, you think you’ll be embarrassed? Well, good for you. Embarrassment is an emotion we humans run away from, not realising that it’s one of the most potent of motivations for us.

Stop pampering those weaknesses and start exposing them to the heat. It’s not going to be easy to defeat some of them, especially those etched deep in more complex emotional reactions, like PTSD, ADHD, etc It’s possible to starve them, and continuously build your strengths until it gets to a point where your strengths can overshadow your weaknesses.

The two things I want you to take away from this long read:

You should and must invest in your strengths.

You can deal with your weaknesses.

Hope you enjoyed reading. If you did, kindly consider sharing with your friends and community. You never can tell who you may be helping to take the bold steps to strengthen their strengths and weaken their weaknesses.

Catch you soon.

More Resources

How to Develop and Improve Your Strengths