Managing oneself -2

Last week we saw the importance of managing oneself.  We are looking at these questions

·  Who Am I ? What are my strengths?

·  How do I work?

·  Where do I belong?

·  What is my contribution?

This week let's look at Who Am I ? What are my strengths?

One aspect of knowing yourself and about your strength is making an inventory of your strengths and weakness.

 

You think you know your strengths but most of the time you know where you are not good at, that is also not accurate.  Since we constantly focus and work on where we are not good at we don't focus much on our strengths.  Don't go by what you think or feel as your strengths as your strengths. Also don't go by what others say also.

 

 One way as suggested by Drucker, to identify your strengths is  to do a feedback analysis. Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you will expect will happen and after 9 or 12 months compare the actual result with you expectation. Over the years you will start noticing the difference.

 

As the outcome of the feedback analysis is first - concentrate on your strengths; put yourself where your strengths can produce results.  Second work on improving your strengths and third discover where your intellectual arrogance is causing a barrier and

overcome it.  What I mean by this is we take pride in our expertise or domain and we take pride in showing our ignorance in other fields. For example a hardcore network engineer takes pride in his ignorance that he can't understand people and their emotions or a top ranked HR executive will say that she can't be with these technical stuff like machines or cars etc.  You don't have to be an expert in other fields but identify these barriers related to your strengths and overcome it. These are your blind spots.

Also observe areas in your life where you are not taking any actions, No action No result. Look at your behavior or manners are you too strong (assertive/ arrogant ?) too mild (helping/sincere) adjust them as per the need.  Same type of behavior may be a constraint at times, be present to what is appropriate. 

To summarize, focus on your strengths; it takes far less effort moving from competent to excellence than incompetent to meritocracy.