Focusing on Your Strengths + Acknowledging Weakness = Sustainable Growth
Self Awareness is Key
*Originally published in SUCCESS Magazine
I remember the first time I heard mention of self awareness, it was Gary Vaynerchuk around 2010 with the release of his first book Crush It.
His definition was simply that self-awareness is being able to accept your weaknesses while focusing all of your attention on your strengths.
Gary speaks often about internal self awareness which is clarity on how we perceive our values, vision, goals, reactions, expectations and on top of that how we see our behaviours, strengths, weaknesses, our thoughts and our threats.
If you’re an entrepreneur I would suggest you would need a mixture of both internal and external self awareness to truly succeed in every aspect of your business and your life. Having this clarity will tell you whether or not you can accept the need for stepping outside your comfort zone.
Self Actualization
So how do we gain clarity, as an entrepreneur to ensure that there will be success on the other side of being uncomfortable?
How do we develop this kind of self actualization that will help us realize where our weaknesses are which will allow us to double down on our strengths?
One thing that I recommend to all of my coaching clients is to perform a SWOT analysis of your own life.
SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weakness, Opportunity and Threats.
I want to be clear, this is not an easy exercise, it is going to take self reflection and a lot of honesty of who you are and what you’re capable of, more importantly, what you feel that you aren’t capable of.
Gaining self awareness in this exercise will be the key to your growth.
Let’s dive into the SWOT so that you can deploy this in your life as a starting point of self discovery to help you grow in business and in life.
How to Use SWOT
The ‘S’ in the SWOT is for Strengths and so the obvious question would be “What are my strengths?”. Some of the other questions that you should be asking yourself are:
In what areas do you truly see excellence in work and in your life?
Would your organization be able to function without you at the helm? If not, why not?
Imagine if you sold the business, would the new owner be able to replace you or are you irreplaceable?
Are your super powers in marketing or operations? Is it Human Resources? Is it your organizational skills, your coaching and people skills?
What is it that makes you indispensable?
Equally as important and probably more introspective and honest, is to understand where you fall down. So again, get really honest and ask yourself, what are your weaknesses.
Using the same example from above, if you sold your business and your new boss was looking for a way to exit you from the company, what would it be?
This is not an easy question to answer, so I would suggest talking with a mentor or your coach, allow them an opportunity to be extremely honest with you and at the same time, give yourself permission to accept that level of honesty coming in.
If you can protect your ego from getting hurt, you will have an open mind and heart to hear someone else’s perspective of you, through the looking glass.
Winston Churchill once said that a pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. Opportunity is hard to see sometimes especially when we hold a somewhat cynical or pessimistic view of the world. Missing out on opportunities makes you question and second guess yourself. I mean, have you ever beat yourself up over a missed opportunity? Sure, who hasn’t.
How do you overcome dwelling on the mistake you may have made and the self loathing that comes with it? You use it as a chance to learn, to grow, to seek out new opportunities as a way to deal with the ‘one that got away’.
Threats in the SWOT are typically things that could render you or the company obsolete or competition that could put them out of business. I would look at threats in this exercise as things that could slow your growth or advancement such as, new technologies that could threaten your position. Or from a different perspective, late adoption of that new technology could wind up hurting your position or advancement inside the company. Introspectively, could your weaknesses be such that they could hurt you within your organization?
Could your schedule be stifling your creativity forcing you to miss out on opportunities?
The use of SWOT can help you to increase your self awareness so long as you are asking the right questions of yourself. Seeking critical feedback from peers, mentors, coaches and those that have your best interest in mind will also be part of the process.
When receiving feedback you must ensure you are focused on asking yourself the ‘what’ questions and not the ‘why’ questions.
Seeking the answers to the what questions will keep you focused on the future through self improvement where being focused on the why questions will perpetuate the negative feedback loop.
Taking a proactive approach to seek out new opportunities and understand your strengths and weaknesses in work and in life gives you the insight to self assess where you are right now and where you feel you need to be in the future.
This can be therapeutic and will give you a chance to ask yourself better questions and to analyze your current situation to understand if this new ‘thing’ is best for you right now.