Personality Development

Premise

Before resuming my Blog posts, I thank Amutha, Balakumar and Manikandan for encouraging and persuading me to start this.

Hope these posts are useful for you. Many of you may be already practicing this; such people can help me by giving feedback to improve this series of posts. For others,  this will be helpful. I have planned to post at least once a week. The posts will be from what I have read, heard and seen as well as my views and experiences. Today’s post is the one part of Personality development.

Strengths & Improvement Area (Weakness)

Each one of you  will have strengths  as well as (weakness) improvement area. [I would prefer to call it improvement area, but for your better understanding, I have mentioned here it as weakness]  If you think that you have only strengths and no improvement area, then you are fooling yourself.

All human beings have both; people with no weakness are much above human beings.

To start with, you must be aware of your strengths and weaknesses. To identify this you need to introspect. Most of us don’t know these - in my (IT) career of over 25 years I have witnessed most people are not aware of their strength and weakness.

In my profession, in every appraisal(performance evaluation),  each individual has to write three of their strengths and three of their improvement areas. Most of them, over 95% will leave this blank. I used to coach them to find out their strengths and improvement areas.

I used to wonder how one can develop oneself and grow in their career if he/she doesn’t know these. At Least one should be aware of their strengths, so they can play to theirs strengths.

As everyone of you have both, only thing you can do, once you become aware of them, is to exhibit the strength more and exhibit the weakness less.

You can ask or wonder, whether you can remove the weakness or not. To eradicate or reduce the weaknesses, you need to do the following:

• You have to identify your weakness (x, y,z).
• You have to accept that x, y, z are your weakness.
• Then you yourself or with a help of someone, probably your mentor (About mentor’s complete role, I will post elaborately later) chalk out a plan of actions to reduce the weakness.
• The action plan may include actions like reading, training, counselling etc. Each weakness may have different set of actions and different timeline to get the desired result depending on the type of weakness and their level.
• Periodically, you need to review your improvement with plan drawn and re-plan if required.

In the above, each step is important. If you can’t identify weakness, you can’t improve yourself. If you have identified, but you can’t accept then you can’t improve at all. Only a miracle has to happen to improve you.  I have come across such people also in my life.

Persons, who know their weakness but not ready to accept and improve them will hide their weakness with opposite trait.

Hope this was useful to a few. If you haven’t identified your strengths and weaknesses till now start identifying them.