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hey what's up this is Leo for actualised org and in this video blog what I want to talk about is the topic of strengths vs. weaknesses and specifically the question of in personal development in getting more success in your in your in your career and your relationships in your health is it better to work on your strengths or is it better to work on your weaknesses and the bigger question is of course just your overall happiness in life are you gonna be happier if you focus on the weaknesses in your life the things that you're not good on or are you gonna be happier by focusing on your strengths so there's some interesting research that that goes and covers both of these topics and looks at which of them is is better so the first and probably the most important research is by Martin Seligman who was the father of the positive psychology movement now and what he actually has on his website authentic app authentic happiness calm is he has a strength to sadness assessment and there you can go on and take the character strengths assessment and it'll literally tell you the top strengths that you have as as your personality type so it'll tell you if your strengths are being generous or being grateful or being open minded or bring curious or being artistic some various strengths and then of course there's the common idea that we want to work on our weaknesses too right so a strengths for example if a strength of yours is is working with people and interacting with people and you get a lot of joy from that and also comes easily to you then that's a strength now a weakness of yours for somebody else that might be a weakness right maybe you're an introverted shy person and therefore working with other people comes as a struggle to you and the question then is is it better to work and fix that weakness over times I can make you happier or is it better to focus on the strengths there's actually a lot of compelling evidence to show that working on your strengths not your weaknesses is the best way to be happy because working on your on your weaknesses is pretty and if you've ever tried to do this in your life is working on weakness then you've known how difficult it is to do this right so maybe you've had trouble with Fitness maybe you've had trouble with with shyness and introversion maybe you had trouble with with other parts of your life like character traits that you notice are deficient in you and working on them can be very challenging because it's it's unnatural it's not your natural way to be so you have to you have to really persevere and you have to discipline yourself you have to retrain your mind basically through a lot of consistent action to to become to become better at that weakness and often times it's really hard to bring that up to the kind of level that your strengths are at whereas with your strengths let's say you're someone who's really good with people and you naturally love being extroverted and talking to people and working with people and collaborating and cooperating in that case that's a strength of yours and if you design your life to run and alignment with that strength that can be a really powerful source of joy for you and just increase your overall happiness so if you're working if you're an extroverted person and that's a strength of yours and you're working someplace right now where you're not able to collaborate with people you're not able to talk with people let's say you're just working in a in a cubicle for nine hours every day well you can see how that can become a problem because you're not really realizing and using your fullest gifts and that's really what happiness is a lot of happiness is about at least the quality kind of happiness that you can get in life is by putting yourself in situations where you're using your gifts to your full potential so if you are that extrovert person finding a job or that extraversion is actually serving the company and it's serving your managers and it's serving the public is a good thing it's going to make you feel really good when you put yourself in that kind of position or if you have some other kind of strengths maybe you're a very athletic person and that's a strength of yours so if putting yourself in a position where you can always be athletic you can always be moving somewhere where you're not sitting in front of a computer and maybe conversely for the kind of person that likes to be alone and that likes to work by himself or herself and likes to have a lot of quiet time then being stuck in an office where you're costly having to go to meetings and hobnob with people that might irritate you and your greatest strength might be being by yourself and having time to think things through and be more logical be more analytical you know whatever that might mean for you and then in that case if that's your strength then aligning your life so that that strength is accentuated it's great because it's a strength of yours right so it's gonna come very naturally very easily to you when you do that you're gonna feel good because you're gonna feel like your natural talents or gifts are being being used so with personal development from my experience what I found is that really it's not an either/or choice it's a false choice to say that you're either gonna have to work on your you're gonna accentuate your strengths just focus on that or you're gonna focus on accentuate it or improving your weaknesses really what you got to do is if you want a stable level of happiness and also success in life what you really want you're gonna want to work on both but I think you're gonna want to start by aligning your life with your strengths that's the most important thing you're gonna get your biggest bang for your buck by aligning your life with your strengths so if you go to authentic happiness calm and you take that character strengths survey it's a it's a pretty comprehensive survey and what its gonna give after you take that result it's totally free it's gonna give you the result and what you're gonna get is you're gonna get a list of your like top five strengths and what I found is if you take those top two strengths that you have and you start to to become really aware of those strengths you first of all consciously now take them on as your personality because before what they were they were strengths of yours but you didn't you weren't conscious about them and now you are and what you're gonna do is you're gonna start to look for ways to align your life and to live those strengths on a day to day basis so you could ask yourself a question like how can I include more of these strengths in my daily routine or how can I do more things throughout the week that will allow me to to really live into these strengths and that might mean that you have to adjust the role that you play at work that might mean that you have to adjust the role that you have in a relationship that might mean all sorts of things depending on your strengths there's like over 30 or 40 different strengths on this survey so that is gonna be a great source of happiness because right now if you're not aligned with your top two strengths and you're not doing that on a daily basis which is really important is doing it on a daily basis making it habitual then you're not getting all the satisfaction that you could be out of your day to day and then you're not as happy as you could be so there's a lot of potential for growth for you there if you're not doing that already but then once you've got those pieces in place I feel like you really take yourself to the next level and to live a charged life not just a comfortable life you're not just gonna want to be living in your strengths you're also gonna be wanting to look outside and try to round out your personality because what I found is that the more rounded you become as you as you grow you basically look at your deficiencies and see that they're there limiting you in certain ways right and in fact I've also found that it can be the case that a deficiency or a weakness that you have is going to limit how much you can accentuate your strengths how much you can live your strengths so sometimes working on your weaknesses is important especially I think when you see that those weaknesses are holding you back from living that charge kind of life this your the thing is that the comfortable life that you're living if you're just living your strengths and you're not taking care of any of the weaknesses that you have you're going to be limited in how far you can go in your life and you're gonna let me be limited with the peak experiences they're not gonna experience as much growth overall and those weaknesses can really be holding you back so if you have a certain weakness don't let that limit you and keep you in a certain in a box because that's what a lot of people do is they're boxed in by their weaknesses by their limitations and even though they might be having a they might have a job for example where they're living their strengths the weaknesses still kind of handing them in so maybe they're shy and reserved and that shyness and reserved Ness they just say well you know I'm a shy reserved kind of person and so I'm not gonna I'm not gonna try to correct that I'm not gonna work on that at all I'm just gonna focus on being very very introverted and I'm just gonna sit and lock myself up in my room and do the work that I want to do and I'm gonna be successful that way I think the fact of the matter is is that you can be successful that way but that's actually a bad thing because a lot of times you can get success by being very laser focused and that's what success is about is about channeling your strengths and focusing them and producing value that you can then get to the people therefore you get value back and return but that doesn't always lead to to ultimate happiness if you want to really work on your happiness and fulfillment in life beyond just success which you've got to do is you've got a look at where your weaknesses are holding you back from really being the best that you can be so maybe that shyness that you've got is holding you back from actually going out and sharing the message that you have I don't personally for me that's being the case I tend to be an introverted person and over the last few years as I've recognized the limitations that that introversion has placed on me I've really committed to working those weaknesses out and what happened is that throughout most of my like my teenage years and then my early career what happened was that I was really bought into the fact that I am an introvert and I'm totally happy with that and I'm just gonna work on my strengths of introversion and so I wouldn't have any problem locking myself in a room and working hard and doing all this stuff and not socializing and I felt honestly good about that I didn't feel like I needed a lot of extraversion but what I found is after I discovered that what I wanted to really be doing with my life is to share some of the some of the wisdom that I've discovered through all my research on personal development going out there and sharing that information which what I'm doing right now I've discovered that I need more extraversion because being as interpreter introverted as I was I was starting to see the limitations of that for example I started to notice that well I would need to be able to go out and interview people because interviewing people gives me more understanding about how personal development works it's hard to to really know personal development just from your own personal experiences especially if you want to help other people you want to go out there and see what are the differences what are the similarities so being able to interview people means you have to be more social which is something that I wasn't comfortable with also I noticed problems with relationships that I was having I wasn't having the kind of a dating life that I wanted to have I wasn't even having the kind of a just a social life that I wanted to have with friends and even simple things like being able to have just like a random chitchat with a stranger or like a store clerk so I found that that was holding me back and and then of course you know public speaking was something that I wanted to get into and I saw that I needed to get into it I needed to break out of my shell together public speaking so I could be a better communicator better deliver that message and also being a better leader being able to lead people with with ideas and understanding how to lead them through words through speech through emotions so for me that's been a journey and it's been really hard because being very introverted that was a weakness of mine is going out there and socializing that was like an uphill battle for me had to struggle through it and I had to keep struggling and I'm still going through that process right now it's still very challenging and what I've discovered though is that if I really want to live into my full potential and live the kind of life that I envisioned for myself the kind of life that I see myself living five ten years from now I really see the importance of working on the weaknesses because if all I did was I focused on my strengths in this case let's say introversion and I'm also very logical analytical person if I just focused on those then I would be limited in how much impact I could have I couldn't really be doing what I'm doing right now and what I'm doing right now is still something that I'm growing into a nun developing my speaking skills my communication skills so all that stuff I would be limited in messages that I could that I can do so maybe if my work was being a programmer for example maybe that wouldn't be as important but because I chose to go into speaking and coaching and motivation the personal development then and I have this blog I had to add to really commit to this idea that I had to work on my weaknesses too and as I've been doing that for the last three years or so I've really taken a taking this to heart that I'm gonna fix this introversion extreme introversion that I had I found a lot of benefits a lot of benefits by having a better dating life better confidence better better friends more being more social just being even more comfortable when I'm at the store and I'm having a random conversation with a clerk or going to get a haircut and being able to instead of what I had before was I would just sit there in silence and sit there in some awkward situation here now I'm able to have a decent conversation actually have fun being able to flirt and be able to crack jokes that kind of stuff it just makes me happier to be able to do that so in this case working on my weaknesses was really really great and I'm still going to continue to do that even though it's challenging so that's the trick is that if you if you're living a comfortable life then you're gonna tend to not want to work on your weaknesses because we're here on your weaknesses is challenging it's much easier to focus on your strengths but back to this idea that really it's a false dichotomy it's not gonna be the case that you work just on your strengths or you work just on your weaknesses you really want to do both because for example for me even though I'm trying to be more extroverted I'm going out there I'm socializing and pushing myself on that front I'm also spending a lot of my time on my strengths one of my biggest strengths as being is being open minded and analytical and being a critical thinker I think that's my top strength and so the way that I work on that is by all the reading that I do all the research that I do all the studying that I knew all the note-taking that I do these these blogs or I do a lot of analysis writing articles that sort of thing so all of that is working on my on my analytical strength and that analytical strength is going to be really the thing that gets me material success so that's if you're trying to build a good career or a job or a business or be successful with money then that's where your strengths are gonna come in and working on those and really focusing on those and for me doing that right now is really rewarding it's it feels more natural it feels easier much easier than going out there and socializing and a lot of times I have this trade-off between do I want to go and go out and hang out with friends and spend a few hours doing that or do I want to spend those couple of hours you know reading a good book or shooting a video or taking some notes something like that and a lot of times I will prefer to do the thing that I'm strong in so I want to be analytical I'd rather sit and read a book for two hours then go out there and socialize at a bar with some friends for two hours but I also realized that if I want to get to where I want to get to if I want to live the kind of life that I imagined for myself 10 years from now where I'm not there doing speaking and I'm influencing people and I know a lot about personal development I'm able to communicate that effectively and I'm also having the kind of friends that I want and I'm also having the kind of relationships that I want I realize that I need to go out there and push push my push myself on the introversion front and push myself out of my comfort zone there so it's a balance and it's tough it's something I have to work through and I'm always kind of tempted to to go one direction or the other so the bottom line here and Evan Pagan talks about this is that if you want to be really successful in your career or in your business focus on your strengths because your strengths when you focus on them they start to generate value that value that you're generating for other people so in your job if you're a greater programming focus on that if you're great at being analytical focus on that if you're great at interacting with people focus on that and then you're gonna tend to you can tend to see that if you do that and you set up circumstances properly then you're going to get the financial rewards in the success that comes from that but if you want to be a well-rounded person overall and you see yourself stifled in certain ways and limited in certain ways by by other factors in your life like factors that are not brought up to the same level as your strengths then those are your weaknesses and to get the best personal development not your business side handled but your personal development you're going to want to look at your weaknesses and you don't want to round yourself out as it as a human being and both of those things I think should be pursued the question is which of those is right for you at this moment right now if you want to work and focus more on your career in your business then you're probably gonna want to take that strength assessment and take a look how do you incorporate more of those strengths in your day to day how do you incorporate more that in your business life in your in your in your career at your job and that's gonna make you really fulfilled and then if you're if you're struggling if you're seeing that you're struggling that you're pretty good with your career and your business and you're happy with that and maybe you're struggling in certain areas of your life like maybe you have a trouble with the work-life balance and you're not having the kind of relationships that you want to have or you're not having the kind of friends that you want to have or you're lacking in some area of your life or maybe something is hold you feel like something is holding you back at work then maybe look at your weaknesses and take a look at what you're not so good at if you take that strength survey on authentic happiness calm then you're gonna you're gonna see they're gonna list your weaknesses as well and so that's probably going to give you a few immediate realizations about areas in your life that could be improved if you worked on those weaknesses and then you can come up with ways to work on those weaknesses and and get those a little bit up and more in line with your strengths and then you'll find that once you've got your strengths and your weaknesses kind of at the same level or you at least you bring up your weaknesses you're gonna have less struggle in your life and it's also a great growth process because as you're struggling to overcome your weaknesses even though it's much more challenging than working on your strengths you're gonna find that you're growing you're realizing new things you're learning new things about yourself that you haven't really known before and you're gonna get a lot of reward from that you're gonna be a lot of fulfillment from that even though it is gonna be challenging so the bottom line is work on both your strengths and your weaknesses it's not the case that one is better than the other it's gonna really depend on what your situation is and over the course of your life you're gonna find that you're gonna have points in your life where you're working a lot on your strengths you're gonna have points in your life where you're gonna be working on a weakness you're gonna have points in your life where you're doing a combination of both and so that's something that you're just got to feel out and figure out what's right for you in this particular moment time so go ahead and take that strengths assessment if you haven't it'll tell you about your strengths your weaknesses it's free it can be found on authentic happiness calm so that's it for this video if you have any if you have any comments go ahead and leave them also check out actualized org for more more videos about how to live your full potential more videos about strengths weaknesses and also the text that usually accompanies these videos you can find on the site get in touch with me I really love hearing comments and I love to hear suggestions for what kind of content I can shoot for the future you