[Guest Blog] Focus on your strengths & worry less about your weaknesses

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At our Hatch Social Club last week performance coach Sandra Berko ran a workshop about improving output by utilising your unique strengths. In this piece she provides the main takeaways from her presentation:


How often do find yourself trying to improve your weaknesses?

We’re taught from an early age that we should work on getting better at the things that we’re not so good at. I personally hated maths when I was at secondary school and my grades reflected this. I received extra tuition only to move my grade up by a notch so I could scrape a pass. Throughout my schooling and my career, still to this date, maths is definitely not my forte! Sound familiar?

Being challenged by either a subject at school or a task at work, no matter how hard you work at it or how much effort you put into it, very little improves.  So why is this?

According to Gallups’ strengths finder (a strengths’ based assessment tool based on positive-psychology), we’re only able to be great at some things. Once you discover your natural talents and play to your strengths, you can start being who you are without trying to be who you are not.

Talking about strengths is not a topic often discussed as we’ve been conditioned to focus primarily on what’s not going well and how to make it better. To be able to identify your strengths is not a solo job. It’s necessary to be provided with a 360-view of how others see you.   

To help you do this, choose 10 or more people who know you well from different chapters of your life. Ask them to write a story about a time they saw you at your best, sharing specific details of what you did and why you made an impact on them.

Look for common themes that appear in these stories and list them.

Create a profile of who you are when you’re at your best.

Ask yourself the following questions:

  • How can I apply my strengths to the goals I want to achieve?
  • How can I use my strengths to live my values?
  • How can I adjust my job to incorporate more of my strengths?
  • How are my strengths visible in ways they are not in others?

The next time you catch yourself worrying about your weaknesses, just remember this:

Anyone can do what you do, but no one can be who you are.


If you are interested in exploring your unique strengths, you can take a quick but comprehensive personality profiling test here.

Our next Hatch Social Club takes place on November 23rd and will cover goal setting.

Join our Meetup Group for more details.


Sandra Berko has experience in scaling small to mid-sized startups experiencing a hyper-growth hiring phase, specialising in hiring & retention, coaching/mentoring & facilitation. As a Performance Coach, connecting the dots between on-boarding and L&D by coaching individuals & groups based on strengths & personality profiling to close the gap between what they do for a living and who they are as a person.