5 ways to figure out your strengths

Whether you are returning to the workplace after a break or navigating a career change, understanding your strengths is key.  The best place to start is by looking at what they are and the impact they have.

What are strengths?

Very simply they are the things you are naturally good at, but also energise you.  When you are using your strengths, you feel confident, engaged and perform at your best. 

If you are able to recognise your strengths, you can use this to choose careers or roles that will bring out the best in you.  Being able to articulate them to your peers can help foster a more collaborative team and being able to demonstrate them to your manager could open up new opportunities at work.  Moreover, being able to draw on these whilst speaking to a prospective employer is a powerful tool to set yourself apart from the rest.

How can I start identifying my strengths?

In this blogpost I’ll cover 5 ways you can approach this using different resources. So have a look through and see which resonates most with you, alternatively you can do them all and compare what comes up.

1. Ask those around you

This is a quick and easy step that can be incredibly revealing. Identify between 10-20 (the more the merrier!) close friends, family and work colleagues. Simply email or message them and ask them what they think are your top 3 qualities or strengths. You can frame it as being part of a project you are working on.

If you want to personalise your message just create one message and copy it multiple times, or even simpler still, create a single email and BCC all recipients. Done!

Once you receive the responses, you will start to identify patterns and overlap. Save all of these responses somewhere where you can access them again in the future. Collate the top 3 most common answers and use this as your start point.

2. Start taking note of your own behaviours

How do you spend your time each day? Start to make a note of the things you are making time for and things that you avoid doing. This behaviour is very telling and it comes to the surface in both your home and work life.

Once you acknowledge these pattern of behaviour you can start to build a picture of the types of tasks you gravitate towards, and therefore where your natural strengths are being used most.

3. Identifying your natural strengths at work

This exercise takes things to the next step. You’ll need about 20 minutes and a cup of something hot (or stronger - I’m not judging!). It’s a resource I use most regularly with my clients and is call The Career Lifeline.

The results will give you an insight into the key themes and patterns in your academic and work career to date, giving you further clarity on where you have most effectively drawn on your strengths in the past.

To access this worksheet for free click here and select ‘Request worksheet’.

4 .Take an online questionnaire

If you have an additional 5 or 10 minutes spare it is well worth taking a free questionnaire online. I recommend the Via Strengths website for this. Click in the top right hand corner of their page to access the free test.

It works on the principle that each person has 24 character traits, and the quiz ranks these traits according to your answers. It’s insightful and an excellent way for you to obtain even more language for you to build your narrative around your strengths.

5. Recognise you don’t have to be brilliant at everything

I spent a large portion of my early career trying to emulate others. Whilst it is great to be inspired by those around us, it’s a fool’s errand to try to become a carbon copy of them. It can be very easy to fall into the trap of wanting to fill the perceived gap to be more like them, and that if we try hard enough, we can turn whatever it is into a strength.

By all means, work towards increasing your competence in areas where you would like to build those skills. This shows commitment and demonstrates a growth mindset to those around you. Just accept that you do not have to excel at absolutely everything that you do.

The most effective individuals are those that recognise and amplify their strengths and seek out ways to exercise them in everything they do.