11 Benefits Of Knowing Your Super-Power

Helen was a self-described shy introvert who worked in publishing and who loved her job – but she was finding it difficult to get promotions.

She knew she had the necessary qualifications and her boss liked her – but she couldn’t seem to make any progress on the company’s ladder.

During a company retreat, Helen took a personality quiz as part of a team-building exercise, and the results surprised her, because they revealed she was a natural leader who motivated others and cheered them on.

Learning that leadership was one of her strengths completely changed Helen’s outlook – she began volunteering to take the lead on more projects at work, and she became much more confident in her abilities, trusting her own inner voice.

Within six months, Helen had a meeting with her boss who told her that senior management was interested in promoting her. She was, not surprisingly, overjoyed at the opportunity.

Many people are like Helen – they stumble through life without knowing their strengths.

And maybe you’re one of them – I know I was.

So if that’s you, here are a few of the amazing benefits of knowing your natural strengths.

You Accept Yourself

Perhaps the most exciting benefit of learning your strengths is that you begin to accept yourself – instead of berating yourself when you fail at something, it becomes an opportunity to evaluate your weaknesses.

You think about your gifts when choosing your projects and joining teams. You know what you bring to the table and you’re able to use it for the good of your organization, community, or family.

You Can Barter More Effectively

You hate writing the company newsletter, but you love the chance to crunch the numbers.

When you know your strengths, you can look for others who are weak in those areas and barter with them.

But if you don’t know where you shine, you might barter your way into a task you hate and wonder why it’s so tough for you.

You Can Better Manage Challenges

Everybody faces setbacks, disappointments, or challenges at some point in their lives.

Maybe you didn’t get accepted into the college you wanted. Perhaps your boss didn’t pick you for the project you wanted to work on. Maybe the client went in a new direction and is no longer interested in your concept.

These moments all sting – but when you understand your value, it’s easier to manage these challenges.

You can approach them with a “can-do” mindset and find an alternative that will work just as well (or even better) than your original plan.

You Can Build Better Teams

It’s easier to build teams and help others grow once you know your strengths. That’s because as your self-awareness develops, you’ll begin seeing where others are skilled and what their talents are.

Once Helen realized her gift for leadership, she also started to recognize other people’s gifts.

For example, she realized her co-worker was a visionary and often asked for her advice when she wanted creative solutions to problems.

Another co-worker was an excellent communicator, so Helen often relied on her as the spokesperson when she needed to talk with another department head.

You Can Choose The Right Projects

There’s no such thing as a perfect project – but there are projects that are a great fit for you and projects that are a bad fit for you.

And once you’re aware of the strengths you possess, you can easily discern the two.

For example, let’s say you’re good with analytics and you do well with reviewing data and making suggestions on how to improve the company’s bottom line – but you’re not great with public speaking.

You might volunteer to be the person on the team who gathers the data but not the one who makes the actual presentation to management.

You Can Compensate For Your Weak Spots

Knowing your strengths will also make you acutely aware of your weaknesses – and this can be a wonderful thing because it means you can compensate for them!

Maybe you have an incredible eye for detail and you’re good at staying with a task until it’s done – but your weakness is big picture thinking and coming up with innovative, new ideas.

Now that you know this, you can surround yourself with big picture thinkers to compensate.

Or you can check in with a mentor or coach who will help you decide what the big picture should look like.

You Can Develop Your Strengths

Just as you can compensate for your weak points, you can also begin focusing on your strengths, the idea being that you can look for ways to actively make them even stronger so your best self can shine through.

For example if you know you’re great at strategic thinking, you may begin looking for opportunities to learn even more about strategy, find new ways to apply your thinking skills, and even help those that struggle with this ability.

There is a great example of this in the book StrengthsFinder, which talks about the golfer, Tiger Woods.

As is well known, he excels in many areas of the game – but he has a weakness (chipping out of sand traps).

What many people (and companies) do is spend a lot of time and effort trying to deal with any weaknesses – but what Tiger Woods did was spend the least amount of time he could on improving his sand trap play, to the point where it wouldn’t ruin his overall game, and then spent the majority of his time becoming even better at the areas where he had natural talents.

You Can Mentor Others

Anybody can become a mentor – but the best mentors know where they shine, and they focus on helping others shine in that exact same area.

You might be an amazing public speaker and take a colleague under your wing who struggles with this skill.

Perhaps you’re highly creative and good when it comes to choosing colours. You could help your friend who’s looking to rebrand her business, or help your neighbour who wants to update her wardrobe.

There are many different opportunities to mentor others when you stop to look for them.

And it’s fun to learn how to apply your strengths in a variety of different situations that allow you to encourage somebody else.

You Can Radiate Confidence

The more you know about your strengths, the easier it is to feel confident about yourself, and that’s because you’re aware of what you’re bringing to the table and how you best function within your family, workplace, community, or school.

It’s empowering when you can define your “special sauce” – you understand that you bring value simply by showing up and you trust that you can be helpful to a variety of people.

You Know How to Lead

Maybe when you think of leaders, you think of authoritarian types that are frequently featured in the military – which is what Helen always thought of.

But when Helen learned her leadership style was democratic, it changed her approach.

She realized there were many different ways to lead teams that didn’t come down to her giving others a “my way or the highway” speech.

You may think you’re not a leader, but anybody can become one – it’s simply a matter of discovering your leadership style and playing to that strength.

You Know How To Sell Yourself

When you understand what your strengths are, you can better sell yourself to others.

(Many people shy away from jobs in sales, myself included, not realizing that almost everything you do is a form of selling – yourself, not products or services. You sell yourself at job interviews, every first date is a type of interview, and so on.)

You might think this involves a complicated sales pitch about why you’re awesome, but it’s so much more than that – owning your strengths affects every area of your life.

For example, you might change how you dress, what you say, how you say it, and even what body language you use.

And that’s because you’ll have newfound confidence that comes from knowing your worth.

Conclusion

You might believe that determining your super-powers is something you’re doing for yourself, but the more you understand where you’re gifted, the more you can give back to the world around you.

Every time you show up, you can do so with confidence, gusto, and excitement – you get to bring the very best version of yourself into each new day!

I think it’s worth pointing out that identifying your strengths (or innate talents) is just one part of working out who you are and what matters to you, and this is a subject I talk about here.

That article mentions the type of personality quiz referenced in the introduction above, and as I say, I have taken many of these myself when I used to work for a major British household name.

Of all of them, I think the CliftonStrengths (formerly known as StrengthsFinder) is the best of them all because:

1. It is backed by Gallup, who do have some credibility in this area.
2. It focuses on talents (i.e. attributes you are born with that tend not to change ) instead of skills (i.e. things you can acquire via learning and experience).

I’ve actually taken their assessment twice – the original one, in 2004 or so, and their updated version, which would have been five or ten years later (after I left that company and moved to the USA to work for myself) – and in both cases, the results were identical.

Not only did the talents they identified resonate strongly with me, but they also give you clues on how to capitalize on whatever those strengths are, which is essentially identifying your super-powers.

And yes, I know that humans typically look for qualities that support their world-view (or self-view) and discount the rest, but the first time I was given the MBTI assessment at work, I was asked whether I thought the results sounded like me.

My response was along the lines of, yes, they do, but I suspect I could identify with at least some of the descriptions of the other 15 MBTI types.

With StrengthsFinder, however, none of the top five talents it identified sounded wrong at all, and I did read the descriptions of the remaining 29 talents and there are none that I would have placed in the top five.

Anyway, don’t take my word for it – give it a try yourself, because once you know where your real talents lie (which may or may not be something you already know), you’ll be much better placed to benefit from all of the advantages of knowing your own super-power(s).

Additional Resources

These are suggestions for those who wish to delve deeper into any of the above:

1. CliftonStrengths Book (formerly StrengthsFinder)