Do You Know Your Own Strengths and Weaknesses?

How do you assess your own skills and how do you plan to improve them? This may be one of the most difficult questions to answer about your life and your career. That is because “most people simply haven’t done enough focused work on this topic,” writes Robert Kaplan in his new book, What You’re Really Meant to Do: A Roadmap for Reaching Your Unique Potential.  

As a result, Kaplan points out, people lack self-awareness and “usually haven’t cultivated coaches who could help them identify their skill deficiencies.” Furthermore, when people do get feedback about their job performance, for instance, they are often ill-equipped to understand “what the feedback really means, how to benefit from it, or how to act on it.”

And so the answer, Kaplan argues, is to take ownership of assessing your skills. What does that mean? It’s your job – not someone else’s – to understand your own strengths and weaknesses. So write them down. Can you do this? 

“Most of us can’t accurately write down our strengths and weaknesses,” Kaplan writes, especially as the demands of our lives and jobs have changed over time. And so, as Kaplan argues in the video below, you need to take this exercise very seriously, and be very proactive about addressing your own skill development. 

The video is part of our series of the most popular videos of Summer 2013.

Watch here:

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.