We don’t like doing things we think we suck at.
The Strengths Movement’s popular saying is, “Focus on your strengths.” This is all well and good. It feels good, too, to only do things you’re good at. But what about the things you’re not good at? What about our weaknesses? What about growth?
What about the things you were not good at when you were a teenager and had to grow into them as an adult? Say, you used to be more introverted and you got a sales job in which you had to become more extroverted. Say, you worked in a retail store and was chartered with selling computers. Sure, the guts of the machine’s features are good to know, but what about the so-called soft stuff that you didn’t know and were not comfortable with? Approaching random strangers. Talking to random strangers. Getting these strangers engaged. Asking them poignant, relevant questions. Fitting them into a good solution that is right for them. While this stuff can be taught, were you taught it? If these skills were weaknesses of yours, would you be comfortable working on them and developing them because they were what’s required to be of service here?
Most of us don’t even like talking about our weaknesses, let alone work on them. We’re too busy bragging about a certain strength of ours on Snap to determine what is required to be of service here.
What do you do if no one else is willing to do the thing that must be done?
What if you recognize that you do not currently possess a skill that would greatly benefit you and your family in the future? Most would not have the humility to admit it, to own it, and thus work on it and grow into it. Why? It’s hard. It is hard emotionally. We don’t like doing things we think we suck at, so we avoid them. We dodge them. We divert them. We push them off to some distant date. We tend to avoid the hard things.
We don’t like doing things we think we suck at.
How do you feel about seeing yourself on video? This petrifies people so much that they refuse to go on camera. Many others cannot stand the way the look in stills, let alone in high definition. What if being on video was required for the job or the promotion? What if someone needed to pick up the PR work that someone else had left behind? What if doing video became an absolute performance necessity? What then?
