While discovering your superpowers may seem like a trivial exercise, defining your dominant strengths will help you see where you have the real advantage and can match those strengths to your professional goals.

Character based strengths may be natural talents you’ve had your whole life or something you’ve developed throughout your career. These strengths can fall into a number of buckets and they’re just as important as skill-based strengths. These types of strengths are soft-skills that include, but are not limited to, problem-solving skills, strong work ethic, and interpersonal communication.

The key is to identify what you are good at and how you can use that to achieve your goals. Concentrate on the strengths. If you are accustomed to the internal critic that concentrates on your faults and shortcomings there is more impact in taking inventory of your strengths.

Is it difficult to recall your individual strengths? The best way to do this is by asking yourself: What am I good at? Take any situation you have been through and reflect on what strengths you used to go through this event. If it is difficult to recognize strengths, ask friends or family what they believe as the greatest power.

If you still aren’t sure, how else can you find out? Explore with a coach or mentor. Take a personality or strength-based assessment. Identifying personality traits related to your favorite color is one way to help you realize your strengths and weaknesses through a tool such as Emergenetics. https://emergenetics.com/. There are many values based tools which a certified coach can facilitate for you.

Levasseur says that getting clarity about your strengths can make all the difference in your career and life. “The No. 1 thing you can do is determine your strengths, determine your superpowers. Because we’re all individuals, and although we’re all capable of accomplishing our goals, there’s no predetermined way to do that,” he says. “Before we can even tackle our mission, before we can even tackle our objectives, self-awareness and understanding who you are and what you excel at is the No. 1 step in anything you do.” (Steenbarger, B., Jun. 2015)

Expand your strengths – seek opportunities every day to leverage your strengths – those things you are good in and enjoy making. Growing strengths has been seen to help individuals feel happier, more confident, more energized and more involved in the task or job they are doing . It also helps you develop a sense of purpose and meaning in life, which will help you climb The Second Mountain. (Brooks, D., 2019)

There’s that cliché about your greatest strengths also being your greatest weaknesses, but, like most clichés, it has some truth to it. The flip side of persistence is stubbornness, for example. We all need to question when and where we play to our strengths if those strengths are also weaknesses. (Percy, S., Feb. 2018)