Recognize Your Personal Strengths

If you want to be able to shine your own inner light, the first step you need to take is to recognize your own personal strengths. Do you know what yours are?

You’re usually so focused on what’s happening around you that you forget about the main character in your own story: you. In fact, in order to recognize your own worth, you first need to recognize your personal strengths. Then, you can start to strengthen them even more.

Knowing your own strengths and how to express them has a big impact on your life. In fact, there are many benefits to using your personal strengths in different areas of your life. These might be physical, emotional, physical, or spiritual. Indeed, different areas require different strengths.

The areas that are linked to your physical and emotional well-being include the meaning you give to your life, your positive emotions and relationships, your level of commitment, and your achievements. In fact, they make up the map that charts your own reality, your state of mind, and your level of satisfaction with your life. You’re able to expand different areas of your map and grow in a positive way when you work on your personal strengths.

Expand your life and recognize your personal strengths

Studies suggest that focusing on recognizing your personal strengths and correcting their faults has a positive effect on your self-esteem, self-acceptance, goal building, resilience, and even your physical health.

In fact, there seems to be little doubt that your strengths lead you to the achievement of these positive goals. We all want to achieve a sense of well-being.

As humans, we have certain cognitive biases. One of them is the tendency to be more affected by negative events than positive ones. This happens in a completely automatic way. In fact, it’s an unfortunate truth that negative emotions and experiences tend to stick to you like glue.

Working on your personal strengths can help balance out this equation. There’s no doubt that negative experiences are a part of life. Indeed, they’re essential. That’s because they’re the way in which you learn, motivate yourself, and practice different strategies to cope with them. All of this helps you grow.

Rethink the negative

Negative experiences don’t define you. Furthermore, your personal strengths will help you in future negative situations. In fact, they’ll remind you that you have your own resources available to deal with these kinds of situations.

Successfully using your personal strengths means that you maintain a greater degree of control in critical situations. These strengths are directly related to your coping skills. Furthermore, they strengthen your psychological immune system against depression.

Recognize your personal strengths

When you’re secure in the knowledge that you have these tools at your disposal, you can tolerate uncertain situations far more successfully. In addition, you’ll be less afraid to take risks. However, where do you begin?

The past is a good place to start. That’s because you’ll probably be capable of overcoming obstacles that you’ve faced in the past. Of course, you’ll need to choose what route to go down. Indeed, many times, there are several routes to choose from. However, you need to select the one that best fits your own personal strengths.

It’s also important to differentiate between your strengths and your talent. A talent relates to an innate predisposition, whereas strengths are more related to trained and learned behavior.

Seligman’s 24 character strengths

Martin Seligman offered an inventory of character strengths in the VIA Inventory of Strengths. This measures the degree of each of 24 strengths, organized into six virtues or categories.

• Wisdom and knowledge. Creativity, curiosity, openness of mind, love of learning, and perspective.
• Courage. Bravery, perseverance, honesty, and zest.
• Humanity. Love, kindness, and social intelligence.
• Justice. Civic strengths like teamwork, fairness, and leadership.
• Temperance. Forgiveness, humility, prudence, and self-regulation. They protect against excesses.
• Transcendence. Appreciation of beauty, gratitude, hope, humor, and spirituality. They give meaning to life.

Every individual has five strengths that characterize them. Seligman’s inventory measures these personal strengths. Therefore, you can first recognize them and then strengthen them. In fact, both your own happiness and the brightness of your own inner light depend on them.