Understanding Your Strengths, Weaknesses, and Values: Key to Finding Your Passion at Work

Knowing yourself and feeling confident about yourself helps a lot in finding your passion at work. This begins with an accurate understanding of your strengths, weaknesses, and values – it’s what makes you feel good about yourself. The process starts by evaluating the factors that molded your personality – family, experiences, education, and training. The majority of your strengths, weaknesses, and values can be determined even at a young age. Some are products of your parents’ upbringing while some are products of unfulfilled needs you try to reinforce as you grow mature. Knowing your top top-five strengths, weaknesses, and values gives you a template by which you measure choices in your career and personal life. Being successful at work means you can freely use all of these strengths as well as fulfill your values.

When your work is not based on your strengths and values, what do you feel? Useless and powerless? You fail when you find yourself doing work that doesn’t sufficiently reflect your strength, values, thoughts, and feelings. When you are in this kind of situation, you feel tied up in a routine that is too far from your own personality. You will usually feel bored and unfulfilled. You don’t look forward to exciting and adventurous days. You feel trapped and always wish for vacations, day-offs, and lunch breaks. Regardless of how much money you make, when you deny your strengths and values – your work is difficult and boring.

The best time to determine your strengths, weaknesses, and values is when you are feeling honest and direct. By accepting your strengths, weaknesses, and values, so much of your potential and possibilities in life can be revealed. It is also important to become proud of yourself. Some people hide their true strengths out of fear of rejection. Your power lies in your uniqueness and powerful people are confident about themselves even when it’s about their weaknesses. To find your passion at work you must resist the urge of comparing yourself to others as it limits your choices and career development.

Your hobbies and interests tell so much about your strengths, weaknesses, and values. We get pleasure from the things we do in our free time such as reading, gardening, and traveling. The things you do naturally and effortlessly motivate and empower you. Pleasurable experiences are either academic or non-academic. When you enjoy yourself doing something, your personal strengths are clearly manifested. Remind yourself of the times you feel so happy at work? What are the values and strengths that were so evident from you?

Values change over time but there are some that remain embedded in our personalities. These values reflect what you think is good and worthwhile. Of all human activities, work has the potential of fulfilling your personal values and defines your career choices. When you are true to yourself and passionate about your values, you are most likely to find yourself in the work you love and enjoy. Most of your values are evident in the things you do and say, yet there are some that come into the open under special circumstances.

Now that you have assessed your strengths, weaknesses, and values, you already can determine your parameters when looking for a new employer or job. Make sure the values and strengths you have are in line with your job or employer. In finding your passion at work it is important to be able to fully share the values and strengths important to you.