What You Are and What You Are Not
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
—Alice Walker
If you’re rich, it is obvious that you are not poor; if you are happy, you are not sad; if you are patient, you are not impatient. You don’t need to read a book to understand the obvious. My biggest what I am not is that I am not patient; I am impatient, so far, so obvious. I have always struggled with the fact that I am not patient and have tried to learn patience. But, even when I am trying to be patient, I am like a kid trying to sit still—I end up wiggling around. I end up saying things like “I know I should be more patient about this but . . .”. Being impatient is really annoying. Why can’t I just wait serenely, in a place of peace and calm, rather than find myself getting frustrated by the lack of progress? To make matters worse, I am a visionary, I think big, and have big ideas about what could be. Achieving my dreams takes time, they don’t just happen overnight. The relief when I achieve a dream isn’t so much relief that I’ve achieved my dream, but a relief from the frustration of wishing I had already achieved it. For a brief period I experience peace, until I start thinking big again and the process of impatient frustration begins once more. Sometimes, the time it takes to achieve something is a LONG time for someone who is impatient. Most of the time the impatience thrums away and I can ignore it, but every now and again, the din gets louder and I go through a period where I admonish myself for not being patient enough. “It will happen” I tell myself. “When?” Comes next. “Soon” is the reply. “How soon is soon?” I lament. I’m like the kid in the back of the car asking “Are we there yet?” But no matter how many times I go through the periods of impatience, I keep going. During the impatient period, I bemoan the issues and problems I am facing and want to quit the journey.
But, despite my complaints, I won’t give up. I can’t give up. This is because I am Tenacious. I will stick at it if I believe that I am doing the right things, and that if I keep doing the right things eventually I will get there. I won’t quit, no matter how frustrated I get. I will continue to journey on, in pursuit of my vision. But I am what I am not. My tenacity makes me impatient. I am tenacious, therefore, I am not patient. I could not continue forward, overcoming obstacles and continue believing that I have a future and a hope if I was patient. It’s not that if you are patient you can’t pursue dreams and persevere; tenacity is about holding fast. So, you can be tenacious and patient. But my tenacity is not about holding fast. My tenacity is related to the fact that I will not relinquish or let go of the pursuit of the vision I have, because I cannot stop pursuing my vision I cannot be patient in the sense of waiting. I have realized that the sense of relief and calm I feel on achieving a dream is in the ending of the pursuit rather than the achievement of the dream itself. It is my tenacity that fuels my energy to continue on even when I get fed up and tired of the journey. So, rather than beat myself up for not being patient, I will instead celebrate the tenacity that makes me who I am, because it is that tenacity that makes me what I am not—I am not someone who has the patience to stop pursuing my dreams.
Embracing Your Weaknesses
I get frustrated when listening to managers working on personal development plans because the focus is on developing individual weaknesses rather than developing their strengths. In Career Tool #2, you were asked to focus on identifying your strengths and spending time thinking about your strengths is essential in understanding who you are. But, although I don’t advocate developing areas of weaknesses beyond ensuring they don’t get in the way of you playing your strengths, it doesn’t mean that you should ignore your weaknesses altogether, or that recognizing your weaknesses doesn’t have value. Weaknesses, viewed within the context of how they impact what you, are not a means that rather than castigating yourself for having weaknesses you begin to understand yourself in a holistic sense. You are who are you, not just because you have strength, but because your weaknesses also contribute to making you who you are too. A weakness may disadvantage you in specific situations or areas, but it may be advantageous in other circumstances. My impatience is advantageous because it drives me forward, it causes me to not quit, and stay the course. In some circumstances, it has a negative effective, but, in others, it provides me with a competitive advantage.
Clark (2014) suggests that we need to reframe our understanding of the totality of ourselves to understand that the mix of both our strengths and our weaknesses is a scarce resource, and rather than competing on someone else’s terms, we should compete on our own playing field to gain clarity about what makes us special. This premise supports the idea that just as our strengths are part of our talent, so too are our weaknesses. Sometimes, those traits that we assume are negative are the very ones required for a particular situation, or combined with our strengths become a toxic combination that helps us achieve the extraordinary. The dogged single mindedness of Einstein was frustrating and led to him breaking with more social conventions and rules than was acceptable; at the same time, his rule-breaking led to him making huge leaps in the field of physics. If he hadn’t been so singular in his approach, in all likelihood, we would never have heard his name. In understanding that our weaknesses can complement or even enhance our strengths, we can begin to grasp the fullness of who we are, and what exactly it is we can bring to the party.
What We Assume Are Our Weaknesses, Are Merely Minor Strengths
I often hear development clients tell me “I am not . . .” yet on further exploration, I find out that they do in fact possess the qualities they tell me that they don’t have. Often the “I am not” comes from a false perception of the quality that they believe they don’t have, or have been told incorrectly over many years by others that they don’t hold these qualities. Take the quality of ‘creativity’ as an example. The number of individuals I encounter who believe they are not creative is huge; you might be one of them. This is because they believe that creativity is artistic or out there and requires the need to be colorful, extravagant, and about new invention. However, creativity isn’t the same as new invention. It can be inventive, but it is also about imagination or being able to create differently. If we were to study the Dyson vacuum cleaner, we would say that James Dyson is an inventor. I think we would agree that the Dyson was inventive and creative in tackling the problem of suction in vacuum cleaners, which changed the dusty (pun intended) vacuum cleaner market and shaking things up with cyclone technology. But vacuum cleaners aren’t new, and neither was cyclone technology. Dyson’s creativity was in combining the two. Or take the iPod. A fabulous piece of engineering inventiveness, which shook the foundations of the music market and forever changed the way we access and interact with music. If we look at the history of portable music, before MP3 players began to surface we had the delights of the Boombox, Sony Walkman, followed by the CD Discman, and finally the iPod. However, the iPod simply took the idea of digital and portable music, added the Apple design credentials, and put thought into where the music downloads would come from. The real invention wasn’t the iPod but the digital music download market, and before you knew it, the music industry was changed forever. These advances were creative, inventive, but based upon what had already gone before. In many ways their invention evolved from previous ideas, products, and services. So what does it mean to be creative? If you use your passenger seat as desktop, wedge a door open with a piece of paper or develop a makeshift seat out of box, that is creativity. Not all creativity has to be iPod level creativity; it is simply using your imagination to create something.
Very often we mistake the extremes of a capability as being the only way a quality can be included in our arsenal of abilities without realizing that there are different levels and applications of qualities in much the same way as the continuum between mega creativity from apple to using a box as a chair. Take my weakness of impatience, for example. Patience can be viewed as someone sitting serenely waiting, calm, and biding his or her time, unflustered and unshaken. I am not like that. But if you look at what patience is, although it can mean calm, it also means tolerant perseverance or forbearance and, in this respect, I am patient. I might get frustrated and have internal conversations ranting about the situation. But I keep on going, believing that it will happen eventually. I don’t give up, and I don’t quit just because things aren’t going the way I want them to. You might have a whole list of hang ups about not being good something, when, in reality, you are comparing yourself with a standard, which is not realistic. You might not be great at writing a report, if the person you are comparing yourself with has an extreme talent in that area, but it doesn’t mean that you are not GREAT, just not AS great. It is a matter of degrees rather than absolutes.
Not Everything You Believe About Yourself Is True
Growing up, I was told repeatedly that I was selfish, and so I believed that I was not generous until I was confronted with a ream of evidence to the contrary. I don’t say this to blow my own trumpet, but to illustrate how lies fed into us as children can stay with us throughout our adulthood, making us doubt our true character and capability. Now that I am a parent, I realize how literally words can be taken, even when they are not meant in that way. We can falsely believe something about ourselves, assume that we have this terrible weakness that is disabling, when in fact, it is a miscommunication that happened at a singular point in time, that has led us to believe something that is patently not true. These false beliefs are probably the most insidious aspect of developmental stagnation. Thinking that we can’t or that we don’t or that we are in absolutist terms is extremely dangerous. In a world which is full of gray edges, where in so many areas that are any definitive black or white answers only degrees of being, absolute thinking is exceptionally problematic.
It is important, therefore, that you spend time considering all things you are not and taking time to revisit them to discover how much more like those things you really are. You might just find out that you are in fact more passionate, compassionate, vocal, organized, creative, patient, generous, visionary, strong, daring, and amazing than you believed you were. The truth is we are all more than we let ourselves believe.
Manage Your Career Tool #9 – Owning Your Weaknesses
Adapted from (Buckingham, 2010)
The process for identifying your weaknesses is the same as identifying your strengths, only this time you will be using the list your capture in the dislike column in Career Tool #2. The next step is to articulate your weaknesses. There are 2 tasks to do this:
- Articulate weaknesses
- Write a weakness statement
Writing a weakness statement, like that of a strengths statement can be time consuming, but it is important that you examine what your perceived weaknesses are. Once these are articulated, you are able to decide whether these weaknesses should be embraced because you are not what you are not, whether they are just minor strengths or actually some of the weaknesses you identified need to be challenged because they are in fact not true. Like identifying strengths, owning weaknesses is not a one-time activity. As you develop your career, you will discover more weaknesses or reveal more insecurities as you improve your self-awareness.
Task 1 – Articulate Weaknesses
Having identified those activities that you disliked in Career Tool #2 Task 1, consider how it is those activities make you feel ineffective. Rewrite the tasks listed in the disliked column to make it identifiable as a weakness
For example, I feel weak when I create tutor resources.
Task 2 – Write a ‘Weakness Statement’
To develop a weakness statement, take “the verb (the doing word) and then drill down into what context you feel most [weak] in.” (Buckingham, 2010)
For example, I feel weak when creating tutor resources because I find it painful working within the constraints of imposed templates and structure. I find that being creative within a structure interrupts my creative flow and feels forced.