How to Find Your Strengths: The Ultimate Guide
Awareness of my unique strengths and how I positively impact people is something that’s helped me succeed as a student, entrepreneur and become a happier, more fulfilled person.
I want to share some two frameworks that have helped me paint a more high definition picture of my strengths and skills, as well as my passions and interests.
The frameworks are
Reflection
Your Reflected Best Self
My hope is that you use these frameworks to recognize your unique strengths and areas of natural leverage, and then redesign your life around them, thus maximizing your impact and fulfillment.
1. Reflection
Reflection is a powerful tool to help you uncover your true passions and strengths. It’s unsurprising that many of the world’s top performers (like Josh Waitzkin) and great leaders (like Marcus Aurelius) habitually reflected in writing.
Reflect on your past to find activities and areas that you enjoyed or excelled in.
This will help you narrow down your areas to which you’re naturally suited and in which you’re highly skilled.
We’re all so busy planning and doing that we seldom make time to reflect on our journey, our motives and how we’re impacting other people.
Reflecting and doing are like swimming and breathing. When you swim, you come up for air after every few strokes with your head down in the water. This allows you to keep on swimming with fresh air in your lungs.
Similarly, making time to periodically reflect on your life and your past experiences, gives you fresh insights and connections that you can then apply to live a more impactful and fulfilling life.
I learned the value of reflection while in high school at UWC. It was mandatory to submit reflections on our academic and extracurricular experiences at the end of every trimester. After shaking off the feeling of being ‘forced’ to reflect, I found that it gave me the headspace to examine the past trimester and see which projects and activities I enjoyed and excelled in, while documenting learnings about myself in the process.
15 Questions to Help you Find your Strengths
When reflecting, it helps to have guiding questions to focus your mind and structure your thoughts around. Here are some questions that I’ve found useful for you to meditate and reflect on, in order to recognize your strengths:
When did you feel flow?
What are you curious about?
Which activities bring you joy?
What did you enjoy growing up?
What activities feel natural to you?
What does your gut say you enjoy?
What are your 12 favorite problems?
What did you enjoy creating in the past?
When did you pick up a new skill easily?
How do you bring value to other people?
What would you work on if money wasn’t an issue?
What looks like work to others, but is actually fun to you?
What areas/ activities/ categories do you keep coming back to?
What do you enjoy listening to podcasts, watching videos and/or reading books about?
What are times in your life when you’ve felt completely aligned with what you’re doing?
Pose these questions to yourself and then write down everything your mind comes up with in response. Construct experiments around those answers to test if they are true.
Repeat the reflection exercise again (once a month, every 3-6 months or once a year) in order to see which answers keep coming up.
Patterns will emerge and will guide you toward your areas of true strength for you to further explore
Reflection will require your time and effort, but that investment reaps the returns of learning more about yourself and better understanding your core strengths.
Desired strengths vs Actual strengths
You must be disciplined to separate the things you want to be strengths from the things that are actually strengths.
In college, I wanted to be an excellent programmer, mostly to motivate myself to get As in my computer science classes. I told myself that because I was interested in technology that programming is a core strength of mine. This was actually a desired strength, something that I wanted to be great at, but wasn’t yet.
But after struggling in certain CS classes and excelling in other non-CS classes like philosophy and design, I realized that while I’m a good, competent programmer, I’ll probably never be a great programmer, despite being passionate about technology and how it can empower people. I also realized that my actual strengths lay elsewhere, in areas like speaking, teaching and writing. These were areas that felt like play to me but looked like work to others, and are areas that I did have a shot at being world class at. This distinction between my desired vs actual strengths only became clear to me through reflection.
Reflection also helped me orient my life and career to leverage my interests and strengths. Rather than try to be the best software engineer ever, I realized the best thing was to actually combine my decent programming skills and my passion for technology with my other people-oriented strengths in order to build technology-enabled products. Looking back, my current work of being a Developer Advocateactually leverages the best of my strengths and interest in technology: I still write code, but also do lots of writing, speaking and teaching. Reflect on how you can leverage your actual strengths in your current work, so that you can further develop your strengths and maximize your impact.
Searching vs Recognizing
Your strengths aren’t playing hide and seek with you. You’re searching for your strengths and passions, but they’re often hidden in plain sight. The goal of reflection is to develop an awareness of your areas of strength and passion, as well as gaining confidence to embrace them.
By reflecting, you’re searching to find things that we’re apparent to you in the past.
You’re looking for clues about why you have the strengths you do. You’re also looking for more precise vocabulary to describe things that you're already good at. For example, instead of just saying “I have people skills”, you’ll more precisely frame your strength as “being good in small group environments and easily connecting with people by building comfort and trust”.
Beyond searching, reflection also helps you recognize your areas of natural interest and competence. It helps you look at your past activities with the benefit of hindsight in order to find things you resonated with and excelled in. As we move through different stages of life, from school to the working world, to marriage and parenthood, we might accidentally drop our areas of passion and strength. For example, as you transition from university to the working world, you might have dropped exploring certain interests and doing certain activities in order to adapt to your busy schedule and family demands.
Reflection helps you recognize past strengths, see how they manifested in your life since then and if they still apply today.
It helps surface areas and activities which you might not have thought were a big deal at the time, but might actually be core strengths.
2. Your Reflected Best Self
I want to introduce you to an exercise which profoundly changed my life. I first did this exercise as a 20 year old college student and it shifted the way I think about my strengths, how I do my best work and how I can add value to the world.
It’s called the Reflected Best Self (RBS).
The Reflected Best Self is a powerful exercise that gives you a 360 degree view of your strengths. During the RBS exercise, you’ll look outward and collect and synthesize feedback from people who’ve seen you at your best in various spheres of your life, both personal and professional.
The RBS will help you examine the impact you’ve made on people in different parts of your life and nudge you to redesign your life around your strengths, so that you can maximize impact and personal fulfillment.
At the end, you’ll be able to answer the question, “When am I at my best?”
The RBS helps you double down on your strengths
We live in a society where feedback is synonymous with weakness. When we ask people for feedback on something, we expect to hear things like “You did this wrong. You're not good enough here. This is where you need to improve.”
However, we very rarely get praised on the things that we're good at. To become world class in our crafts, we must identify our areas of strength and double down on them.
The RBS will give you a 360 degree view of your strengths and who you are at your best according to people from different parts of your life.
This RBS helps to correct the bias we have about our own strengths by providing us with feedback about how we impact people around us. Often these qualities are so natural to us that we don’t consider them as strengths and perhaps don’t give ourselves that recognition that we deserve for these strengths.
The RBS helps separate your Desired vs Actual Strengths
Most people look at strengths as aspirational -- “What would I like to be good at?”. This could be because of peer influence, our ego, societal pressure etc. These are Desired strengths. The RBS exercise is a helpful tool to recognize our Actual strengths because it separates actions from aspirations.
Friends, family and people we’ve worked closely with are actually better at telling us what we're good at because they see us in action.
By focusing on times they saw you at your best, they help us discover our actual strengths as their answers will draw on times where you’ve demonstrated your strengths in practice.
Looking back at things you’ve actually done is a better indicator of who you are at your best than who you imagine yourself to be, or what you desire to be good at. And who better than people remind us of our best moments from different spheres in our life and help us find moments we didn’t think were a big deal but were significant to them and deserve more of our attention?
How to do the RBS Exercise
List 10+ people from different parts of your life
Ask them, “When was I at my best?” and collect their responses
Look for patterns in the responses
Compose your self portrait of who you are at your best
Redesign your life around your strengths
RBS Step 1: Make a list
Make a list of 10+ people from different contexts in your life who have seen you at your best.
In your list aim to get as many spheres of your life where you people have interacted with you closely and have seen you work. These are the people who will give you insight into your strengths and the impact you have on people.
We all have different areas in our life where people see us at our best: parents, high school, friends, past jobs, internships, our work teammates, people that we've done group projects, college friends, your manager, boss, teachers, mentors, family members, people from clubs you’ve joined etc.
By gathering input from a variety of sources—family members, past and present colleagues, friends, teachers, and so on—you can develop a much broader and richer understanding of yourself than you can from a standard performance evaluation.
It’s often these people (friends, family, teammates) who know what our greatest strengths are, but never had the chance to tell us.
Take for example, how entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant recounts how it was his mother (!) who pointed out his real strengths (he calls this specific knowledge):
“The first person to actually point out my real specific knowledge (natural strengths) was my mother...I was telling a friend of mine that I want to be an astrophysicist and she said, “No, you’re going to go into business.”
She’d already observed that every time we walk down the street, I would critique the local pizza parlor on why they were selling their slices a certain way with certain toppings and why their process of ordering was this way when it should have been that way.
So, she knew that I had more of a business curious mind, but then my obsession with science combined to create technology and technology businesses where I found myself.
So, very often, your specific knowledge (natural strength) is observed and often observed by other people who know you well and revealed in situations rather than something that you come up with.”
Write down at least 10-15 people from the areas above. Not everyone will respond, so aim for as many as possible. (For context: I’ve gotten 25-35 responses the last 2 times doing the RBS).
RBS Step 2: Collect feedback
You want to ask each person on your list a simple question: “Can you please describe a time or times where you've seen me at my best”
One rule for this step: Do not change the wording.
This question is intentionally open ended. It’s designed to elicit more genuine and authentic responses than asking “what are my strengths?”.
It focuses on actions and forces the responder to be specific about the context in which you demonstrated the strength in the past. It bypasses the responder’s analytical filter and maneuvers around responses they think you might like in order to arrive at something more genuine and sincere.
Block off up to 2 weeks to get responses. Don’t be afraid to follow up after a week to remind people to respond.
Pro tip: The easiest way to collect responses is with a Google form like this:
Step 3: Look for patterns in the responses
After you’ve gathered all your responses, process them to find patterns.
Responses will cluster together around themes. Several people might point to the same skill or same context in which you’re at your best. Some might point to things that you may have not initially thought of as areas of strength (often interpersonal skills). Rest assured that if you’ve asked a large enough sample of people, there will be commonalities and things that keep coming up that you won’t be able to ignore.
Make sure to note down recurring themes, even if you initially don't agree with them.
We often internalize our expertise and activities of maximum impact so much that we don’t consider them to be strengths.
Pro tip: To help you process the responses, you can create a table of common themes, instances of the theme, who noticed and your interpretation:
After you’ve boiled down the responses into themes, you’ll also notice intersections and connections between them. These themes will give a very good picture of how you're actually creating value in the world, and how you're actually impacting people.
As an example, here’s some of the themes which emerged from my 2020 RBS and how I saw them connecting together:
Step 4: Compose Your Self Portrait
Create a self portrait of who you are when you are at your best, combining reflection (internal inputs) and RBS themes (external inputs).
The self portrait is your answer to the question: “Who am I when I’m at my best?”
It’s also the answer to the question, “What are my strengths?”, because you’re at your best, when using your strengths in the contexts they shine the most!
Here we combine the themes surfaced from our RBS responses, with reflection on our own strengths, passions, interests and skills (as detailed in Part 1).
This combination of external and internal inputs is closer to the truth about your strengths than if you just took each of them in isolation.
As an example, here’s a visual representation of my best self combining my internal reflection and RBS themes:
Your self portrait is a 1-2 paragraph written declaration. It starts with the phrase “When I am at my best, I…”.
In those paragraphs you succinctly outline what you do when you’re at your best, drawing upon themes surfaced in your RBS as well as from reflection on your past.
Here’s an example Self Portrait, from my 2016/17 RBS:
The self portrait represents an ideal. It is something to revisit often so that you can measure if you’re missing the mark you’ve set for yourself.
Writing it out ensures that the image of your best self is imprinted on your mind, so that you can more deeply internalize this understanding of your strengths.
Step 5: Redesign your life around your strengths
The last and perhaps most difficult step is use your newfound understanding of your strengths to take action in your life right now.
How can you double down on your strengths?
Your RBS brings your strengths to the surface. Your job is to ensure that you’re adequately using those strengths in your personal and professional life. Consider the following questions:
How can you spend more time practicing your areas of strength?
How can you make life decisions in order to optimize for your strengths?
What activities, practices and experiences will deepen your mastery and increase your impact?
How can you use your unique strengths to bring value and happiness to yourself and those around you?
How can you reorient your work and life to use your strengths?
Having knowledge of your strengths allows you to (re)orient your career and work to use your strengths and further refine them.
This could mean taking on more responsibility in your current job, starting new side projects during nights and weekends, or something as drastic as finding a new job in a role that’s more aligned with your strengths.
For example, if you’re a founder or team leader, defining your Circle of Competence, the areas in which you are best suited, allows you to leverage your strengths and then offset your areas of weakness by delegating or hiring others who are world class at them.
At the very least, knowledge of when you are at your best gives you license to explore and try new things that you think would best utilize your strengths.
Consider this an invitation to question your assumptions of what you thought you could achieve and be and start from scratch, using your RBS and Self Portrait as a compass.
What activities can help you further develop?
Your RBS will identify areas where you are good or even great at.
With the right nurturing and practice, you can go from good to great to world class in your areas of strength.
This allows you to have more of an impact with your strengths and ultimately, escape competition through authenticity.
You could get expert coaching, enroll in courses, find mentors or simply seek out like-minded people who are trying to level up on the same skill. Using myself as an example, in trying to improve my written communication and double down on my strength of sharing knowledge, I enrolled in a writing course (Write of Passage) and started this newsletter to keep me accountable.
Further education and a commitment to improving your strengths helps you improve and creates a positive feedback loop where you spend more time harnessing your strengths, since you’ve invested in improving them.
Your Turn + The RBS Starter Kit
Now that you’ve seen all 5 steps of the Reflected Best Self Exercise, it’s your turn to try it and unlock a deeper understanding of your strengths and who you are at your best!
If you’re looking to deepen your self-awareness, understand how you can make the best impact or just looking to be world class at what you do, the RBS take you to the next level.
To help you get started, I’ve put together an RBS Starter Kit to kickstart your journey.
The starter kit contains scripts, templates and sample artifacts which I’ve developed for myself when doing my yearly RBS. I’m super excited to share them with you and hope they help you overcome the initial hurdle of resistance.
