The article below builds upon insights taken from: Bolles, R.N. (2014). What Color is Your Parachute? Berkley, CA. Ten Speed Press. and Pink, Daniel H. (2008). The adventures of Johnny Bunko: the last career guide you’ll ever need. Penguin. Image by Freepik.
Strengths vs weaknesses
The key to success is to steer around your weaknesses and focus on your strengths as they are part of the innate success mechanism that you are born with. When you amplify your strengths you are more likely to feel confident and relaxed which has the additional benefit of worrying less about your weaknesses. If you instead solely focus on your weaknesses you will automatically work against your nature, thereby frustrating yourself.
How to identify your strengths
Below are some questions you could ask yourself in order to identify your strengths:
- What are your strengths and weaknesses? The contrast between both helps you to more easily define your strengths.
- What do you do consistently well?
- What gives you energy rather than drains it?
- What types of activities create “flow” in you? Csikszentmihalyi (1990) defines flow as “the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity”.
Identify your transferable skills
Another useful starting point for finding out what you do well is looking into the subject of transferable skills (Bolles, 2014). These are broad types of skills that could be applied in different jobs, i.e. working with either (a) people, (b) information, or (c) things. How would you rank those three transferable skills? Which one do you rank first, second and third place? Examples of transferable skills can be found here. An exercise in identifying transferable skills in previous jobs can be found here.
What skills do you love to use?
Finally, it is not what skills you can do that matters most; it’s what skills you love to use, among those that you can do. Passion plus competency, not just competency alone, is key to securing employment (Bolles, 2014). Therefore, deciding on your favorite skills should not be an intellectual exercise but an emotional exercise. For example: ask yourself who you want to be as a person and what skills are part of that life story? A useful handout to identify passion + competency can be found here.
Revisit this exercise later on
This exercise is part of an iterative brainstorm process. Over time you will gain experiences which change and narrow down your answers to the questions above. So it could help to revisit this exercise a few weeks or months later. I would recommend to initially fill out this exercise in a loose, relaxing, non-straining way, mainly building upon your past experiences, ideas and dreams, instead of strictly, and mindlessly, working with lists of competencies.
At a later stage, using a list can be a great tool to check your own ideas with a wider range of options. However, the main purpose of the exercise is to build upon your ‘inner voice’ instead of ‘outside voices’ (e.g. rigid lists that don’t let you use your own imagination).
Go to 1.2 ‘Follow your vocation, not your passion‘