Hello everyone! Has it truly been an entire month
since I’ve blogged about anything? Wow, where does the time go? Sorry I’ve been away for so long, I’ve been “sailing
as it were” (keep reading and you’ll understand the reference. I just happened
to get an interesting metaphor from Robert Biswas-Diener – the Indian Jones of
Positive Psychology. I felt this was a great way to help people understand the
difference between weaknesses and strengths. All too often we are focused on
getting rid of weaknesses, yet a better use of our time would be to focus on
building our strengths. Read on and see what you think about the clever
sailboat metaphor. I think this is a great way to get the message of Positive
Psychology across and how to use our strengths in practice –whether working with
athletes, students, C-suite executives this really sums up the philosophy of
what we are trying to accomplish
Have a great week and I promise more to come!
Are you focused on the sails or the leaks?
by Robert
Biswas-Diener of Positive Acorn - www.positiveacorn.com
I recently assigned the students in my positive
psychology course to write a term paper
about a personal goal. I assigned the paper on the first day of class and gave
them the full ten weeks of the term to make progress toward their goal. I
assured them that they would not be graded on the success or failure of their
goal but rather on how much they learned.
It turns out that I, myself, learned quite a bit
about the types of goals people like to set. I saw roughly a dozen papers
dealing with poor eating habits, another eight focusing on debt and
mis-spending, several on managing their time more effectively, and a couple on
reigning in flaring tempers. In almost every case my students chose to focus on
weaknesses and perceived personal failings. Wasn't this a positive psychology
course? Where were the papers written about developing personal strengths?
People - especially managers and executives - often
wrestle with the notion of fixing or overcoming weaknesses. This common sense
view holds that weaknesses, because they are deficits, are the greatest
potential areas of growth. Most people
overlook the fact that investing in overcoming weaknesses has a poor return on
investment - because the effort costs are so great. A relatively better
investment is learning to develop strengths. Even so, weaknesses should not be
ignored.
To better understand the relationship between
strengths and weaknesses consider the metaphor of a sailboat. If you have a
leak (a weaknesses) you should generally keep an eye on it and attend to it in
direct proportion to the amount it troubles you. Managing weaknesses will keep
your "boat" from sinking, and it is therefore important to address
weaknesses before the metaphorical 'leak' gets out of control. Strengths, by
contrast, act more like the sails of a sailboat, and are more responsible for
pushing a person forward toward their goals. Like real sails, strengths also
need to be adjusted so that they are used in the proportions that situations
warrant. Thus strengths and weaknesses act like two separate processes with two
separate outcomes: managing weaknesses keeps you afloat and developing
strengths pushes you forward.
When you consider your own strengths and weaknesses
how much effort do you think you need to put into each?
