All right, Welcome to this week's topic, topic that we're going to talk about today is strength and we're going to not only talk about strength and why it should be important that you work on your strength as opposed to what weaknesses challenges whatever word you want to use.8 Some people like to kind of steer away from the idea of saying weaknesses, I'm going to use it. But again, if that's a word that's uncomfortable for you, use something else, call it a challenge, call it an opportunity. But we're going to talk about this idea of strengths and weaknesses. Where should we spend our energy? Maybe as a child, you were told by your parents? And and I think this was this is a wonderful thing to say to your Children. By the way, I'm not a parent, but I would say this is probably, I wouldn't say this is bad parenting, but our parents are often often tell us you can be anything you want, Little johnny, little little sally, you can be anything you want in the world. I think at this point in life, I hope you realize and I hate to rain on your parade, but I hope you realize that's not true, right? I'm not going to be Michael Jordan's, I'm not going to be Albert Einstein, That's just the way it goes. I don't want to go too far into this right now, but there's such thing as soft limits and hard limits in life. Soft limits are those things that we can break through or we can push aside. But there's really in reality, there's there's a thing called hard limits and these are the things that you just can't get past. Alright, we don't have the right makeup, we don't have the right talent, we don't have the right something to to make that happen. I don't think that should be a negative. But I think you as all of us should go out and explore what those limits are, right, where the where are my limits? A lot of times? Soft limits look like hard limits, but they're actually not. We can actually push through them. So we need to explore those frontiers, push out there into our outside of our comfort zone to explore and see what I'm capable of. So I like this quote. This quote really kind of sums that up. You cannot, you cannot be anything you want to be. Okay, let's let's wrap our minds around that reality. But you I'm going to tell you right now, I don't know you personally, but I can tell you with great confidence, you don't know what you're capable of yet. Okay, I know that because I I've walked this path and I still am trying to figure out what am I truly capable of? I'm capable of a lot more than I ever thought I was. I think that's the takeaway. And so are you. And so the idea is the only way we can know that is by going out there and exploring those again, those frontiers as we dig into this idea of strength. Most of this is coming from, from gallup and the book strength finder too. Dot it is listed as a reference in the back of this slide deck. This is a quote from the book. And so what I really want you to kind of zero in on is people that focus on their strengths are six times as likely to be engaged in their job as an individual that should get your attention right? How many people like to be engaged in their job? I think everybody probably raised their hands. Yeah, that's me. I want to be, I want to be engaged, I want to be excited to go to work. I want to, I want to do work that matters those sort of things. So I think that should get our attention if you're a Ceo or a manager watching this, if you don't think that impacts your bottom line, I'm here to tell you it impacts it in a great, great deal. So you should watch your workforce engaged as well. So again, focusing on strength increases that six times. That's a good thing for all of us. Okay, the other thing to look at is the people that focus on their strengths are three times as likely to report having excellent quality of life. Again, they should get our attention, I don't know about you, but I like an excellent quality of life. So again, focusing on our strengths can be a pathway to yielding basically the rewards of not only being more engaged, but also a better quality of life when I was younger, especially as an athlete, I was always taught to focus on your weaknesses. If you can make your weaknesses a strength that was, you know, kind of the holy grail of really elite performance and that's really been kind of blown out of the water with the research. And I think for good reason it's so much more fun to work on strengths and weaknesses. But here's the deal. If you work on your weaknesses, you can you can expect that your energy is is going to be spent more on damage control and a lot less self improvement. So it's this idea, I don't know, I feel like it's it's wrestling with a bear, right? It's hard work. You don't feel like you get a lot out of it when you're when you're spending a lot of energy focusing on your strengths. So again, I think, you know, if you've done this in the past that when we are working our our weaknesses that can be very draining. Okay, and I'm here, you know, by the way, I have a company called Forging Metal incorporated where we talk about doing hard things, I'm not here to advocate for taking shortcuts hacks. The easy path. That is not what I'm saying, I do think there's times when we need to do the hard work, we need to do this stuff that's uncomfortable. But you will only excel by maximizing your strengths and your weaknesses. Okay again this is this is not what we were told 2030 years ago. But but now this is the newest research saying that this is more effective for us if I want to perform at a high level this is this is what I would offer. I would say you can't completely ignore our weaknesses. This is my real world experience. If I completely ignore those things that our weaknesses, they could become a liability for me. Alright so I need to be very careful that I spend enough time. This is my advice and you can take this or leave it. My advice is spend enough time on your weaknesses to make sure they're not a liability then let them go and then spend more of your time and your I should be more clear, spend more of your energy on the on the strength for the reasons we just mentioned. Alright so I can't I don't think, I think the takeaway for this is don't ignore your weaknesses. I think we need to spend a little bit of time on those to make sure they're not holding us back or getting in our way and then turn our attention to strength. Talent Times investment equal strength. That's the equation. Nice. Simple. I like simple but notice I think when I look at this. The thing that I kind of focus in on is talent and strength aren't those aren't those the same. Well, of course if we look at this this equation. No, they're not quite the same. But here's the deal. If you take talent, you add some investment to it. You're going to get hopefully a strength and so we're going to come back to this equation. But let's take a look at each one of these individually. Talent a natural way of thinking, feeling or behaving All right. These are the things that that I don't know, dare I say, come easy to us or at least easier to us. These are the things that we go, wow. There it is. That's the thing that that I was made to do. That is what I'm going to call a talent or that's what strength finder would call a talent. So let's go with that quick, easy definition for talent. We look at investment. That should be self explanatory, right? But you know, it's deliberate practice. You know, sometimes you'll hear this in performance psychology. This should be deliberate practice. You should be focused on what you're doing. It should be hard. And you should this is work All right. This is this is the slide, this is the word where we bring work into the equation. Alright. We're going to get through this world without some some good hard work. And so this is where we do this. We develop those skills. We have deliberate practice. And we build on that knowledge that we have, right knowledge is only potential power. We need to do something with it to make it into real power. And that's where investment comes into play. Next is strength, right? This is what we're shooting for. This is the Holy Grail, and this is that I like the fact that they use the wording near perfect performance. If you're a perfectionist, let that go right now, let it go. Alright, I'll talk more about perfectionism in some later lessons why that can be destructive and harmful. But for the sake of this conversation this lesson, let's just say near perfect performance. Call that what you want, call it elite performance if you want. But I would say please define that for yourself. Okay, define what excellence looks like for you and then stick with that. Don't let society do that. Alright, so that strength is going to be where we're kind of knocking it out of the park if you're a baseball player, you know, I'm smacking that thing out of the park. All right, that is where we want to be. That's what we're going to call our strength. Right? So back to our equation again, I just want to emphasize, you cannot get the strength without investment. So many people nowadays are looking again for those shortcuts. Those hacks the easy path, right? The path of least resistance. They want to get to the strength without the investment. Alright, this is time and energy that we need to put into developing that talent we have, I can tell you is a former baseball player. I played at a pretty high level and I've seen so many of my fellow players that had way more talent than I did, to be completely honest. Way more talent than I did not saying I didn't have any talent. But they were they were just those people that you go, wow, look at the talent they have and and a lot of them did not invest in that. They had the talent and they didn't do the work to turn that into a strength. And I'll be honest most, well not most, I don't know anybody that relied just on talent and made it to Major League Baseball. And and really when I was a young player that was that was what I wanted, I wanted to be a Major league Baseball player. But the one you can have all the talent the world if you're not going to invest in it and you're not going to turn it into a strength, it is not going to take you to where you want to go, okay, we can get by for a little while on talent alone, but we need to work all right, so keep that in mind. You got to work to make this this strength at my company forging metal incorporated. Our tagline is forged a culture of strength. And so I'm really attuned to this idea of not only focusing and developing strength, but I mean it goes even deeper than that, where we talk about in my company, we focus on mental toughness, resilience, and so we take it to a kind of a whole nother level. We say we're going to be mentally tough and and develop that strength, that's a little bit of a different conversation. But I think you can see there's definitely some synergy here with the idea of focusing on strength. That's it, what I have for strength. I want you to take one thing from this lesson and say I'm going to show up differently in the world, I'm going to put this into action, I'm going to engage, I'm going to invest in something. All right, nothing changes. If nothing changes, I'll see in the next video
