How to identify your strengths and weaknesses

We all have strengths and weaknesses, but how do you know which are which? In this post I will take you through some tips on identifying both.

Chances are, you’ve completed a personality test at some point in your life.

Personality tests are used in many industries from hiring to dating to career counselling, and they can be helpful if used properly–but they aren’t always accurate.

If you want to know more about yourself and what makes you tick, then taking the time to learn how to interpret these tests can be helpful. In fact, knowing what questions to ask when taking one of these tests will help ensure that the results are useful for understanding your strengths and weaknesses as well as other important characteristics like leadership potential or communication skills.

If you haven’t taken a personality test, start with this one.

Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI): This is the most popular and widely used personality test in the world. It was developed by Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother Katharine Cook Briggs in the 1920s as part of their research on human development. The MBTI measures preferences for how people perceive their environment and make decisions, which are based on four pairs of opposing traits: Extraversion vs Introversion; Sensing vs Intuition; Thinking vs Feeling; Judging vs Perceiving. Each person has a preference for one trait from each pair (for example, someone who prefers introversion over extraversion would likely be an ISFP). Once you take this test online or at your local career centre (it costs around £40 or £75 for a personal or a career test), it will tell you what kind of job fits best with your strengths–and offers tips for improving areas where needed!

Take the test as honestly as possible.

Take the test as honestly as possible.
If you are feeling stressed, tired or distracted, it’s best to wait until another day when you’re in a better frame of mind. You need to be able to give yourself fully to this exercise if it is going to help identify your strengths and weaknesses accurately.
If you feel like taking this test will impress someone else–or worse yet, if someone else told you what their results were–then don’t take the test! The results should be about YOU and only ABOUT YOU so that they can help guide YOUR future career path (not anyone else’s).

Remember that strengths and weaknesses are not opposites of each other.

One of the most common mistakes people make when identifying their strengths and weaknesses is assuming that strengths are only positive things, while weaknesses are negative. This is not true! For example, someone who is very organized could have a weakness of being too structured or rigid. It’s also possible for someone who is highly creative to also have trouble with focusing on details and staying focused on tasks at hand.

So what does this mean? Well it means that if you’re trying to figure out what your strengths are (and how they apply), then you need look beyond just looking at what feels good or makes sense on paper; instead try asking yourself whether or not something will work well in context–and then see if there’s anything else that could work even better!

Your strengths are things you do well, but they aren’t necessarily what you enjoy doing most or have the most confidence in. And they don’t necessarily solve the problem that is facing you now.

Think about what your strengths are and how those could help you get through this particular challenge. For example, if one of my strengths is persistence and another is being a good listener (which can help me to understand other people’s perspectives), then perhaps I should talk with my friend about their problem before making any decisions about what needs to happen next.

When it comes to weaknesses, cataloging the kinds of things you struggle with will help you pay attention when opportunities arise to address them and improve your skillset.

When we look at our own or others’ weaknesses, it’s often easy to see what they are: they’re things we don’t enjoy doing or aren’t good at. In fact, if someone else doesn’t enjoy something, I’m more likely to think twice about assigning that task to them. However, identifying your own weaknesses can be more challenging because sometimes we don’t realize that something is a weakness until after we’ve tried unsuccessfully at it–and even then sometimes still don’t know why our efforts didn’t work out!

If there’s one thing I’ve learned through writing this blog over the years (and having conversations with friends), it’s been this: everyone has different strengths and weaknesses–some obvious but many subtle–that affect their performance in various situations across their lives

If a trait helps achieve goals and advance in your career, then it’s a strength

If a trait helps achieve goals and advance in your career, then it’s a strength. If it doesn’t help you achieve your goals or prevent them from being achieved, then it’s a weakness.

For example: if you’re really good at writing code but not very good at managing people or making decisions quickly on your own, this does not make “writing code” one of your strengths. It does mean that something else needs work though! For example: maybe you need to learn how to manage people better or learn how to think through situations more quickly so that they don’t get out of hand before they get too big.

The most important thing to remember about strengths and weaknesses is that they’re not mutually exclusive. You can have both, and a lot of people do! If you’re looking for ways to improve yourself as an employee or a leader, then it’s worth taking the time to identify what those areas might be.