Follow Your Passions

There is a adage about a chain only being as strong as its weakest link. Generally, this is being used to describe an individual within a group or team of some sort. However, it can also be applied to what is going on inside each one of us internally. As strong as we may be in many aspects of our lives, there may be things inside of us that we consider to be glaring opportunities for improvement. Figuring out how to overcome the parts of us that may be roadblocks to what we want to accomplish in life is a challenge. But before we face that challenge, we have to do something else – we have to identify and be aware of what those areas of opportunity are, and we have to desire to improve them.

Often, when someone is close to a subject, they have a hard time being objective. And the subject most of us are closest to is ourselves. In order to overcome this lack of objectivity, you would normally call in some sort of third party support to offer you a more objective opinion. This is what I suggest you do in order to better understand not just where you might have some need to grow, but also where your great strengths lie.

Go ask some trusted friends to do you the following favor (and offer to return it if you wish) – ask them to write down five strengths that you possess, and ask them to write them in order of how great the strength is. Then, either on a separate sheet of paper or preferably on the back of the same sheet, have them write down what they perceive your greatest opportunity is for growth. (Note – I’m purposefully not using the term “weakness” anymore because it’s negative and self-defeating, and what we are trying to do is positive and uplifting.) There is a school of thought that it takes five praises for each criticism we receive to have balance, because of how we take both things inside of ourselves and process them, hence the 5-to-1 ratio.

I think as you ask a few people to go through this exercise and gather a small body of data, some things will probably appear (they did for me). One, there will be some things that appear on your strengths list that are essentially the same as what someone else writes on your opportunities side. This just comes down to other people’s perceptions, and while valuable to be aware of and think about, is perhaps not something to concern yourself about. Two, there will likely be things that you already knew on both sides of the paper. However, there will also be those things that catch you by surprise, that you were unaware of. Things that others perceive in you as greatness whereas you never considered it any more than the way you go about your day. Things that are so natural to you, they aren’t things you are particularly conscious of. What I personally think is the most valuable, and the hardest to pry out of people sometimes, is something that you were completely unaware you were doing that is holding you back, or making you shoot yourself in the foot.

Often when these things are brought to light, you have one of two reactions. Either you have an “A-Ha” moment where light shed on it was all you needed in order to try to begin making things better. Oh, you have an “Oh no” moment where you have a hard time processing what has been brought to your attention, go into denial about it, or ignore it rather than trying to deal with it at that point. All very reasonable, natural reactions to have. We’ll talk about how to work through the harder things we struggle with in the next blog post.