Converting weakness to strength

Quite often we talk about ways to convert our weaknesses to strengths. This is an important question, and we will return to it periodically.

Most people feel flawed one way or another, even fundamentally flawed in many cases. With all the influx of seemingly perfect bodies, perfect vacations, perfect social lives and … (you name it), no living person can compare with the ideal to his advantage. Recent studies show a variety of reasons why social media generates anxiety and depression. There are similar studies regarding effects of advertisement on the way we perceive ourselves.

The mental aspects are not very different from social and body image perception. As you probably know, Anna has dyslexia, Jonathan has severe ADHD, I have very poor orientation in space. We cannot fully change these characteristics. Anna still fights spellers, Jonathan tries to kill email distraction, and I have an unhealthy reliance on Waze and Tripadvisor. We can change our habits in a way that compensates our disadvantages, and we probably learn along the way to overcompensate our limitation. Anna teaches speedreading, Jonathan refers to himself as a “speed demon” and I navigate the world of ideas much faster than most of my peers. We converted our weaknesses into potent motivations to build our strengths. If we could do this, so can you.

Converting weakness to strength is a seemingly simple and straightforward path:

1. Recognize and accept your weaknesses. You cannot effectively change something you are not aware of. Fortunately, we painfully aware of some of our weaknesses.
2. Get guidance from someone you trust. Find a mentor. It is better if this mentor is not a member of the family but a sort of consultant, otherwise there may be conflicting interests. There is typically too much emotional history and investment to do the change without outside help.
3. Be very prepared. An open mind is very different from an empty mind. If you come prepared, you will be able to perceive finer nuances of guidance and will be able to choose higher quality of guidence.
4. Hire the skills you lack. Use technology if possible. Anna learnt speedreading by getting through a 120 hours long speedreading course, which provided the seed experience for her expertise…
5. Get just good enough. If something is harder for you, this does not mean you need to invest all of your energy into it. Once you are good enough, focus on your strengths for better return on investment.
6. Look for ways to serve others with the same problem. For many, aggravation is the mother of invention. You will be a better teacher after successfully fighting a weakness. You may also build a powerful service or product out of it/

What is equally important, we should celebrate the strength we acquired by heaving to overcompensate our difficulties. They differentiate us from our peers and build up good positioning. ADHD is linked with entrepreneurship, dyslexia with creativity, poor visualisation with high abstract reasoning. Lawyers will read slowly and doctors will have poor calligraphy. Your weakness is an engine behind your strength and you should be grateful you are different.

So next time you struggle with visualisation or subvocalization, push yourself too hard or procrastinate, get confused by details or ignore something in plain sight, ask yourself: how does this make you different and how you can use it to your advantage? If you cannot find an answer, you can always buy 1:1 Skype training with Anna and she will guide you to it.