Building on Your Strengths

Posted by Rahna on February 28, 2008 under Personal Branding | Be the First to Comment

I heard a talk on Wednesday where the speaker was suggesting that people don’t play to their strengths enough and that they should do more of that.   There is a book that I read that I thought was terrific by Marcus Buckingham called Now Discover Your Strengths. He also wrote another book after that on what to do once you know what your strengths are called Go Put Your Strengths To Work.   

You must understand what your strengths are. I think that that is something that is very important for personal branding—in fact critical to developing your personal brand.   

There are certainly efforts that can be undertaken to evolve your personal brand to include those things that you don’t think you are strong enough, but always build your brand from the standpoint of your strengths.  When I recently gave a talk on personal branding, at one point, someone said, “How can I gain the confidence to do something that I know is not a strength for me?” My response was that they should start with something that they are strong at and step a little bit out of their comfort zone.  Gain some confidence in the new skill built and then step a little bit out from that, then a little bit out from that, then a little bit out from that. You don’t go from learning addition to calculus. There is a whole series of steps we take to learn and grow–addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, algebra, geometry. These are all the steps we take to lead up to calculus and beyond.

It’s the same when you are learning new skills. Play to your strengths. Use your strengths to provide a solid foundation to build new skills and expand your personal brand.