Day 8: Recognising Your Strengths
7 Cups has an exciting online therapy update to share this month. To celebrate, we’re doing 25 days of Gratitude, Self-Care, and Personal Growth and please keep checking each day for updates!
Hi everyone! I hope you are doing well. In life, it can be easier to fixate on what we lack or our areas of improvement and not give enough credit to ourselves for all that we excel at. Today let us take a break from the constant criticism of self and indulge in recognizing our strengths and truly reflecting on all the things we do well.
Some people know their strengths and others don’t. One of the reasons why so many of us never really know what our strengths are is that it can be easier to criticize and be criticized than it is to praise and be praised.
So today we will reflect on our strengths. That is all great but how? There are many ways, if you feel truly lost, following is a way to find your strengths working backwards:
- Look back at all the life that has passed and zoom in on any moments where you excelled at something. This can be writing an assignment, helping a friend etc and write down what that event/thing was and what exactly you did.
- Pick out the qualities/skills required to excel at the identified thing
- Look at the skills you have picked and then try and see if you have done things in life that included some of the skills mentioned in your observation. These are likely your strengths.
💡Another way is to ask 2-3 people who are close to you and whose opinion you value. It is important to select someone neutral or positive, this is not a time to ask a critical parent or a hard-to-please friend, we want someone neutral or generally positive for this ask. This is not a test of their taste but rather a need for impartial observation.
If you try these two methods, chances are you will have some understanding of your strengths. Usually, we find our strengths aligned with the work we can do in a state of flow. It is when you feel like time flew by, you got so immersed in the task at hand that you lost track of all time.
Let's look at some strengths that you may resonate with:
- Listening
- Leadership
- Empathy
- Teamwork
- Collaboration
- Conflict resolution
- Writing
- Drawing
- Cool headedness
- Persuasive speech
Share with us 1-3 of your strengths.
Bonus exercise: In the spirit of gratitude, reach out to someone offline or online and recognize their strengths. It can be as simple as this ‘Hi X, I was thinking of you and realized I never told you how good you are at making people feel included. I just thought you should know that! You are awesome’
Further resources:
Do This to Strengthen Your Strengths! 🔴 The Self-Care Lounge
