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Knowing your strengths

It's that hyper-typical interview question: "what is your greatest strength?" or "what are your strengths?" Usually that's followed up with a question about the opposite, but that's for another post.

So from a fairly young, and frankly immature age, we face down this idea of having things we do well, characteristics that are predominant in our nature, skills that we have triumphed over to levels mere mortals only dream of attaining. And so we articulate our answers in the interview setting, or we internalize these sound bites as who we are.

And we grow up, which frankly, I'm mostly dodging! But we do, we mature, we age, we ripen, with time. And hopefully not only do we gain wider perspective, but we deepen our strengths, understand them better, and turn our focus in those directions.

But sometimes we wake one day, literally or figuratively, and realize that we have been following those strengths and we're not sure we like where we are. "But," we say to ourselves, "I'm doing what I'm good at, I'm utilizing my strengths." Yet on the flip side we've gotten complacent, we've reached a professional limit, or we're just not fulfilled anymore. While we might be excellent at what we are doing it's not what fulfills us. Even more so we may find ourselves penned in by this fence we have created by focusing on our strengths.

Now it seems to me, but I don't know yet because I'm still too young to have reached this stage in my life, but we might find that when we come to this realization we are also somewhat stuck. Why? Because we are also now at an age where making a shift or a change, in particular a professional shift, comes with too much risk, challenge, or uncertainty. And so it's simply easier to keep going down that same path, because the end is almost in sight.

Is it really? Are we really being honest with ourselves if we do this? Are we really fulfilling our full potential here on earth if we stay static, even stagnant?

Having not yet reached that point of questioning, I have no answers. But I do know that when I find myself saying to friends or colleagues that X is a strength of mine, I do pause for a moment and think about if that's really what I want to be saying and if I really want to go down that path. Because above all else, I want to be choosing the path I go down, not be pushed down one I didn't mean to start.

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