How To Turn Your Weaknesses Into Strengths

In this talk, I go over how to turn your perceived “weaknesses” into strengths. Quite often, I’ve noticed many of my clients struggling in professions and skillsets that run counter to their natural temperaments and abilities. Instead of constantly fighting against the world, I advise them to go to places where their perceived flaws are actually seen as strengths. Context is quite important! I talk about how to turn your perceived "weaknesses" into strengths and include a few examples.

Transcript

Hey this is Ish and in today's talk I want to talk to you about how to turn your perceived weaknesses into strengths.

So one thing I do when I talk to different clients and I coach them on how to find their purpose and passion in life is that I find their natural strengths and then from there I try to dive in to see what they're naturally very good at and what their strong suits are and then from there I'll try to see what paths they can go down on.

And then naturally the question comes up they might say you know I'm not good at anything or I don't know what I'm good at and this could be you know due to just a lack of self-reflection or perhaps I just haven't tried a lot of different things but more often than not it's usually because from society whether it's from parents or from school their school or different things they hear in the news is that their natural personality traits aren't very valued they're constantly being told that they're not good at various things so instead of what I want to do is take a different approach and actually tell you that you can actually take your weaknesses or perceived weaknesses rather and you can use that to your advantage to find out the right environments for yourself and what you should where you should go where your skills are actually valued instead of looked down upon.

So if you constantly think that you're not good at anything or you don't have any strong skill sets it's probably because you are going down a certain path that doesn't naturally value those qualities and instead you want to align yourself with places and environments that will reward you just for you being you so that's what I'm going to talk about.

And I also wanted to bring up here that the beauty of life is that although we are connected in a lot of different ways and we have this unique sameness about us there's a lot of individuality so every person is different because they have a lot of different factors involved so part of it could be genetics and others could be temperament their natural temperament and how they express their personality this varies from person to person you also have lifestyle you have like a lot of different other factors and because of this we all have some natural unfair advantages and there's going to be certain tasks that you will do naturally very well at what other tasks you do really bad at you may be wondering like why am I not picking up a certain skill set or why am I not doing as good as my peers who started at the same place as me so you're probably in a field that doesn't naturally optimize and use your natural skill sets and your natural strengths that you just have so part of this process is to do a self evaluation to see what your natural gifts are and if you can't really find that you can just generally describe your personality type traits and how you appear to yourself and also other people and then from that you can see which environments can I go to to where this unique combination of these traits will be valued and actually admired rather than looked down upon so context is very important here and to illustrate this point I'll give you an example of two very different people and how they have unique strengths that can be seen as weaknesses in other places and vice versa so the first example is John Taffer you might know him from the TV show Bar Rescue and this is where he goes into different struggling bars and restaurants that are doing like really poorly and he will you know work with the bar owners to completely revamp the entire place and from his help the bar owners will start to see a lot of profits and more customers coming back and he generally just builds up all these really rundown and like bars that are like about to go bankrupt into really successful and thriving businesses now looking at his personality itself you can probably if you watch any of his the episodes you'll probably describe him as being very argumentative very aggressive very bold and also impatient and generally he seems like a very ambitious and type a personality type so all about hustling working hard and he has a very short fuse I would not be smiling if I were you I have never seen the lack of control that you guys have for a staff and I want to bring it down to a customer level for a second they're drinking and robbing you blind you didn't make money tonight but they did you didn't have fun tonight but they did look at him laughing over there when I walk out of here they will you again and you do nothing about it here's the deal tonight you're gonna fire one of them to prove that you mean it and I won't remodel their bars they bring you back now this combination of these traits right I'm sure growing up this was seen as a weakness like if he was in a school system I don't know the guy but I'm sure his teachers would have told him that he needs to work on his anger maybe take anger management classes or perhaps not argue with the teacher and like not like fight back and you know he's probably seen as a disruptive kid this is my assumption and just to sum up he'd probably be described as a very difficult personality right so this could be seen as a weakness in a lot of environments that will want for you to conform to the rules and they set expectations and not really push back so a lot of like nine-to-five jobs are like that so if I'm sure if John we're working in these types of environments like these corporate environments he would do like really badly but these same weaknesses and then use that quotation marks are actually seen as great friends in his field the reason why is that when he approaches these bar owners oftentimes the bar owners have different staff members working for them that are very corrupt perhaps they are very lazy they're not performing very well they might have like accountants in within the restaurant that just aren't doing their job so as a result they're just like losing money all the time the bar owners themselves actually take a real pride in their business right because they they're using up their savings to keep their you know dying business up afloat but they probably have people that work for them that are like just really they don't care as much right so John's personality actually works very well because he's actually able to confront these members that in their team that aren't doing very well they're slacking maybe they're taking very easy or they are just very careless or they just don't care and he's able to like you know tell them the bottom line like hey you need to work on this or you're out of here and he's actually fired different members from the team as well I've been in there for two hours I can take a break breaks are every four hours not every two hours I don't have to go in there and serve drinks okay so we have an attitude issue here me it hundred percent I have my staff threatening to quit if I don't get rid of Melissa that's a major issue you want me to fire of course do you agree with me she needs to go of course I agree with you you know that before I got here we just were scared to do it well if you have a strength because I'm here you'd be crazy not to use it I have to do it Melissa come on right now I am feeling emotional it's like breaking up with somebody you have an attitude that this place revolves around you you pay attention to no rules and that's acceptable to you you one of the most selfish employees I've ever met I've never met anyone who says I more than you so I am firing you now and are you supportive of that decision I believe so at this time don't cop out no it is a good the right decision so good luck so if you take the same quality of being very confrontational and you you know put John in a like a customer service type of job or something where he needs to like follow the rules he would do really poorly and he would probably get fired right away but in this context it actually makes him very great because he is able to call on behavior that isn't acceptable he's able to save businesses due to his direct and imposing nature and he's able to like solve problems and he's like a no BS kind of guy and this is actually works very effective and you'll notice that all these bars that he tries to help ends up like becoming very successful at the end of it because he was able to really be very precise call it any unwanted behavior and he's very effective at what he does now the same could also be true of Gordon Ramsay he's like another similar personality type and he works in the food industry and restaurant industry as well so I'm sure more people know about him and he he's like very aggressive nature and like hostile nature actually works in a lot of different contexts because he's able to help people grow better by pointing out their mistakes and he has no problem doing that right but now we've discussed that one set of character traits now let's look at the opposite and the example I'm going to use is myself so if you were to describe me I'm sure from watching my different videos and talks you'd probably describe me as being pretty chill probably very patient intuitive as well and I'm definitely not a type a personality at all and more type B so I'd rather like sit on a beach and read a book then you know hustle it out in New York City that's just my personality type so growing up obviously I was these personality traits were seen as a weakness so they were seen as something that's not desirable I was often called as someone who's very lazy and you know I don't work hard and I'm just careless and I don't care about things you know both from parents and society school systems they would say that I have potential and I'm squatting away and all these all these things right so you can see how these personality traits would be seen in a negative light well guess what what are some places that value these set of personality traits well yoga meditation any kind of Eastern spiritual discipline and in fact the whole act of like non striving for things and not like being an ambitious person and being very chill is actually the goal of many Eastern spiritual disciplines so it's very interesting that people will spend their decades of their lives trying to get it get rid of their attachments and getting rid of like their hustle mentality and trying to be more peaceful and I was just born like that so so in this case my my unique set of traits fit well in this particular environment of yoga spirituality personality tests and all that type of things while if you were to take these same traits and put me in a sales job I would do really bad at and this is the beauty of life where we all have unique strengths and weaknesses and a lot of suffering comes to people who don't naturally utilize their strengths and instead they are barking up the wrong tree or they're going to environments that are not right for them so instead what you want to do is understand your perceived weaknesses or take your overall traits and see what environments would actually appreciate that and just naturally as you are so there's no need for you to really change or revamp your personality rather just go to places that would naturally accept it right so that makes sense and you know just to hammer in the point you wouldn't want John Taffer to the guy from bar rescue to teach a yoga class or a meditation class and likewise you won't want me to run a business because I would just I would fail and make it go bankrupt real fast I'm not good with money organization all that so it's all about remaining true to who you are and just going to places that would accept you just as you are instead of trying to be something different and and trying to like struggle your way and climb a ladder so to speak and make it much harder on yourself and just to finish this talk I'm going to leave you with a clip of Gordon Ramsay who as I described has like very aggressive personality type trying to meditate with a monk and you can probably imagine how that would go be well I've heard that meditation can focus the mind and the Buddhist monks are the experts I've wangled an audience with prata Chan the meditation guru at a local temple I have a bad reputation for getting angry and somewhat frustrated is there any form of meditation that can help inside meditation would be perfect for you most Buddhist men in Thailand will train as a monk at some point in their life it can be for three months or a lifelong commitment meditation is a big part of what they learn some do it for 14 hours a day I'm going to try it for 20 minutes now the big challenge sitting still for 10 whole minutes I'm supposed to acknowledge any thoughts that come into my mind naughty thoughts thinking thinking thinking food critics pardon me food critics food critics thinking thinking thinking Oh so God and how did it go see now I feel twice as bad come because I feel like I've wasted 20 minutes how did you manage to do that for 14 hours a day you have to like what you do have to see the value in what you do thank you I have to get up now because my bum is numb excuse me I'm grateful for the lesson but I think it's time to make a fast getaway take care