In this new article you’ll learn how to use your strengths more effectively.
Think back to your last performance review. Or a school report. Or a job interview. Where did most of the conversation go?
For most of us, it went straight to the gaps. The subject you were failing. The “one thing you could work on.” Your strong points got a nod and a quick “keep it up,” and then everyone moved on to the problems.
That habit is so normal we rarely question it. But it has a cost. When you pour most of your energy into patching weaknesses, the things you’re naturally good at sit half-used, like a sports car you only ever drive to the corner shop. And if you’ve been stuck in that loop for a while, it’s easy to start underestimating yourself altogether.
This guide takes the opposite route. Below are 11 ways to spot your strengths, use them more often, aim them at things that matter, and keep them from turning into liabilities. Each one comes with a small, concrete step. Pick two or three to start with. You don’t need all eleven by Friday.
1. Notice which tasks give you energy
Being good at something and having a strength in it are not the same thing. You can be competent at spreadsheets and still feel drained after an hour of them.
Psychologist Alex Linley, who headed the Centre for Applied Positive Psychology (CAPP) in the UK, defines a strength in his 2008 book Average to A+ as a pre-existing capacity for behaving, thinking or feeling in a particular way. The key part of his definition is that it’s “authentic and energising” to the person using it. Energy is the tell. A real strength tends to leave you more awake at the end than at the start.
Say you’re a project coordinator who’s excellent at chasing deadlines but quietly dreads it, while the two hours you spend untangling a messy process fly by. That’s a hypothetical, but it shows the split: one is a learned skill, the other looks a lot like a strength.
Start small: for the next five working days, put a plus or a minus next to each task in your calendar depending on whether it lifted or sapped your energy. Look for the patterns on Friday.
2. Take a validated strengths assessment
Your gut is useful, but it’s biased. Most people undervalue the things that come easily to them, precisely because they come easily. A structured assessment gives you language for what you’re seeing.
The modern strengths movement has a fairly clear origin. After returning from the Second World War, Don Clifton began researching at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, driven by a simple question about what would happen if we studied what’s right with people instead of what’s wrong. That work became the StrengthsFinder assessment, launched in 1999 and later renamed CliftonStrengths, which sorts talents into 34 themes. Gallup, the company Clifton led, says more than 38 million people have now completed it. Shortly before he died in 2003, the American Psychological Association gave Clifton a Presidential Commendation as the “Father of Strengths-Based Psychology.”
A second tool grew out of academic work in the early 2000s. Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman led a three-year project involving 55 scientists that produced the handbook Character Strengths and Virtues. The VIA Survey built on that classification is free, and the VIA Institute on Character reports more than 35 million users.
Your move: take the free VIA Survey and write down your top five results. Don’t treat them as a verdict. Treat them as a first draft you’ll test against real life.
3. Ask people for stories of you at your best
Other people see things you can’t. They watch you on good days, in crises, in meetings where you forget yourself and just get on with it.
In a January 2005 Harvard Business Review article, a team of researchers from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and Harvard Business School (Laura Morgan Roberts, Gretchen Spreitzer, Jane Dutton, Robert Quinn, Emily Heaphy and Brianna Barker) described a method they called the Reflected Best Self exercise. Their starting point was blunt: “Most feedback accentuates the negative.” So they flipped it. You ask a mix of people, from colleagues to family to old teachers, for specific stories of times you were at your best. Then you look for themes and write a short self-portrait that begins “When I am at my best, I…”
One manager in the article, Robert Duggan, a former military officer stuck in a mid-level role, asked 11 people and got all 11 replies within ten days. He used the themes to reshape his work and was later promoted to program manager. That’s one person’s account in a business magazine, so it’s an illustration of the method rather than proof that it works for everyone.
The trick is asking for stories, not adjectives. “You’re organized” tells you little. “Remember when the client moved the launch and you rebuilt the plan overnight?” tells you a lot. If asking feels awkward, a few tips on how to have a good conversation can make it easier. Pick five people this week and send them one line: “Can you tell me about a time you saw me at my best?”
4. Use one top strength in a new way every day
Knowing your strengths is a start. It’s not enough on its own, and there’s research that shows exactly where the line sits.
In 2005, Martin Seligman, Tracy Steen, Nansook Park and Christopher Peterson tested several short happiness exercises against a placebo in a paper published in American Psychologist. Of 577 adults who started, 411 completed every follow-up. One group simply learned their top five strengths and was asked to use them more. The effect showed up right after the week and then vanished. Another group did something slightly different: they used one of their top strengths in a new way each day for a single week. In Seligman’s 2005 study, that group reported higher happiness and fewer depressive symptoms for six months, and the benefits were strongest for people who kept the exercise going on their own.
A team led by Fabian Gander repeated the experiment and reported the results in the Journal of Happiness Studies in 2013. Across nine interventions, 622 adults completed every follow-up, though only 73 of them were in the “new way” group. That group again showed gains in happiness that held at six months. Both studies relied on self-reported mood, which is worth keeping in mind. Still, the difference between “knowing” and “doing something new” is striking.
Novelty seems to matter. Using curiosity the same way you always do is autopilot. Using it to interview a colleague from another department is a stretch.
Test it this week: pick one strength from your list and, each morning, write down one new way you’ll use it that day. Seven days, seven different uses.
5. Make daily use the goal, not occasional use
Strengths aren’t a party trick you pull out once a quarter. The payoff seems to come from frequency.
In an October 2015 article, Gallup researchers Peter Flade, Jim Asplund and Gwen Elliot reported that people who use their strengths every day are six times more likely to be engaged at work. They were also 8% more productive and 15% less likely to quit, according to the same piece, and three times more likely to describe their quality of life as excellent. Gallup’s figures on daily strengths use come from its own survey data, and the article doesn’t list sample sizes. Gallup also sells strengths assessments, so read these as strong correlations from an interested party, not as proof that daily use causes the gains.
Even so, the direction lines up with the experimental work in the previous section. If work has started to feel flat in that slow, hard-to-name way sometimes called quiet cracking, it’s worth asking how many of your days use what you’re good at.
A quick experiment: at the end of each day, rate from 0 to 10 how much of your day used your top strengths. Keep the score for two weeks. If it hovers below 3, that’s useful information about your role.
6. Reshape your job around what you do best
You probably can’t rewrite your job description tomorrow. But you can change more of it than you think, and some organizations have redesigned whole systems around this idea.
Deloitte is one of the better-documented examples. In the April 2015 Harvard Business Review, Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall described how the firm had tallied the cost of its old performance reviews at close to 2 million hours a year. While redesigning the system, Deloitte studied 60 of its high-performing teams (1,287 employees) and compared them with a representative sample of 1,954 employees. Of the conditions linked to high performance, the strongest across the organization was people’s sense that they had the chance to use their strengths every day. Deloitte’s response was practical: weekly check-ins between team leaders and team members, and four forward-looking questions about each person instead of a backward-looking rating.
The article also cites earlier Gallup work covering more than 1.4 million employees, in which business units that strongly agreed with the “do what I do best” statement were 38% more likely to be productive. Like most of this research, it’s correlational. It doesn’t tell you that strengths cause performance, only that the two travel together.
What you can borrow at an individual level is the idea of small, regular adjustments. Getting more organized at work helps here, because you can’t shift time towards your strengths if you don’t know where it’s going.
Here’s a simple way in: list your five most time-consuming tasks. For each one, ask whether you could do it in a way that uses a strength, trade it with a colleague who’d enjoy it, or shrink it.
7. Aim your strengths at goals and keep sharpening them
A strength with no target is just a personality trait. Pointed at a goal, it starts to compound.
The strongest numbers here come from Gallup again. In a July 2016 report, Brandon Rigoni and Jim Asplund described a study of strengths-based development across 49,495 business units, 1.2 million employees, 22 organizations, seven industries and 45 countries. Compared with control groups, workgroups that received strengths interventions improved on several measures. The ranges below describe what 90% of the studied workgroups achieved:
| Outcome | Improvement after strengths interventions |
|---|---|
| Sales | 10% to 19% higher |
| Profit | 14% to 29% higher |
| Engaged employees | 9% to 15% more |
| Safety incidents | 22% to 59% fewer |
The report doesn’t describe its methods in detail, and it comes from the company that sells the CliftonStrengths tools involved, so treat the exact figures with care.
Independent research points in the same direction at the personal level. In a 2010 study in the International Coaching Psychology Review, Alex Linley and colleagues followed 240 college students across three months. Students who used their strengths more made better progress on their goals, and that progress was linked to higher well-being. It’s a single, fairly small study, but the chain it describes makes sense. Strengths make effort feel lighter, so you keep going, and progress itself feels good.
Choose one goal you care about for the next 90 days and name the strength you’ll lean on to reach it. If you tend to drift, it helps to treat that plan like a promise you keep, to yourself.
8. Stretch your strengths until you hit flow
Using a strength is one thing. Growing it takes a bit of friction.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent decades studying “flow,” the absorbed state where time seems to disappear. In a 1989 study with Judith LeFevre in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78 working adults reported their experience at random moments over one week. Flow, which the researchers defined as high challenge matched with high skill, was reported far more often at work than during leisure.
The mechanism is worth spelling out. If a task is easy for a skill you have, you get bored. If it’s hard and the skill isn’t there, you get anxious. Flow sits in the narrow band where a task asks a little more than you can comfortably give, and your strength is what makes that band reachable. So stretch a strength and you’re more likely to land in flow. Flow then makes you want to come back, and coming back is how the strength improves. Note that the 1989 study shows an association between challenge-skill balance and better experience; the loop described here is a reasonable explanation, not something that single study proves.
Think of it like a gym. Lifting a weight you can already throw around does nothing. Lifting one you can’t move at all does nothing either, except risk injury. The analogy holds for the “just beyond comfortable” rule. It breaks down on feedback: muscles tell you clearly when you’ve overdone it, while with mental strengths the signals are vaguer, usually a creeping boredom or a knot of anxiety. There’s more on getting into that state in this guide to entering the flow state.
Next time, do this: when a task feels too easy, add one constraint (a tighter deadline, a higher standard, a new format) that forces your strength to work harder.
9. Watch for the moment a strength tips into overuse
Every strength has a shadow. Confidence curdles into arrogance, and kindness, pushed far enough, turns into never being able to say no.
Psychologists Adam Grant and Barry Schwartz made this case in a 2011 review in Perspectives on Psychological Science. They argued that psychology had focused on the benefits of positive traits while largely ignoring cases where more stops being better. Drawing on Aristotle’s idea of the mean, they reviewed evidence for “inverted-U” patterns, where positive traits reach a point at which their effects turn negative. The paper is a review and an argument, not a single experiment, and the evidence varies by trait.
It’s fair to say this is debated. A 2019 white paper from the leadership consultancy Zenger Folkman, based on ratings of 20,000 managers, reported no harm from extremely high competency scores. One way to square the two: being very good at something isn’t the problem. Using it everywhere, even where it doesn’t fit, is.
So the question isn’t “Am I too strong?” It’s “Am I using this strength in the right place, at the right dose?” If you’ve noticed yourself steamrolling people with energy or over-planning simple tasks, this list of things to stop doing is a good gut check.
Give it a go: for each of your top three strengths, write down what it looks like when you overdo it. Then ask one trusted person whether they’ve ever seen that version of you.
10. Get your manager talking about your strengths
If you work for someone, their focus shapes yours. That makes your manager one of the biggest levers you have.
The gap in Gallup’s numbers is hard to ignore. In a 2012 article, Gallup chief scientist Jim Asplund reported that employees whose managers mainly focus on their strengths have a 1% chance of being actively disengaged. When managers focus mainly on weaknesses, that figure rises to 22%. Gallup’s 2016 report adds a related number: 67% of employees who strongly agree their manager focuses on their strengths are engaged, compared with 2% of those who strongly disagree. These are correlations, and the people with strengths-focused managers may differ in other ways too. A 1% versus 22% split is still a big enough gap to act on.
You don’t have to wait for your manager to read the research. Bring it to them. Most managers want to know how to get the best from their people; they just default to what’s broken because that’s what reviews are built around. If you manage others yourself, it’s worth looking at what makes a good boss from the other side of the desk.
In your next one-to-one, share your top three strengths and one task where you’d like to use them more, then ask what support would make that possible.
11. Cover your weaknesses with people, not willpower
Ignoring weaknesses entirely isn’t the answer. Some of them can sink you. But the smartest fix is often a partner, not a personal overhaul.
There’s a well-known piece of history behind this. In the late 1960s, Meredith Belbin was invited to research at the Administrative Staff College in Henley-on-Thames, England. Over seven years his team ran business games, three a year with eight teams in each, and recorded what every member contributed. Belbin expected teams of the brightest people to win. They didn’t. These high-intellect groups got stuck in damaging debates and struggled to make decisions, a pattern later nicknamed the “Apollo Team Syndrome” after the first such team. The teams that performed well had a mix of different contributors. Belbin published the findings in 1981 in Management Teams: Why They Succeed or Fail.
What does that mean for you? A team of people with identical strengths shares identical blind spots. Pairing up with someone who’s strong where you’re weak gets you further than years of forcing yourself to be good at everything. It also cuts down on the urge to compare yourself to others, because their strengths stop being a threat and start being a resource.
Your move: pick your most draining weakness and name one person who’s strong in that area. Offer them a trade, your strength for theirs, on one small task this month.
What to do when you slip back into fixing weaknesses
You will slip. A tough review, a new boss, a project full of tasks you hate, and suddenly you’re back to grinding on gaps and forgetting what you’re good at. That’s normal, and it doesn’t undo your progress.
Research on habits backs this up. In a 2010 study in the European Journal of Social Psychology, Phillippa Lally and colleagues at University College London tracked 96 people trying to build a new daily habit (82 completed the study). On average it took 66 days for a behavior to become automatic, with a huge range of 18 to 254 days. Missing a single day, though, had little effect on long-term progress. What did hurt was missing many repetitions, which lowered how automatic the habit became.
So one bad week isn’t failure. A bad quarter might be a signal that something needs to change. Here’s how to get back on track:
- Restart the smallest version. Go back to one strength, used once a day, in one new way.
- Look at the trigger. Did a review, a role change or a bad day pull you back? If it was a rough patch, these steps to get over a bad day can help you reset faster.
- Re-read your best-self stories. The feedback you collected in point 3 is your evidence file for days when your confidence dips.
- Tie it to an existing routine. Strengths reflection works well paired with something you already do, like your first coffee. Building it into a wider set of good habits makes it stick.
The bottom line
You can’t make every weakness into a strength, and you don’t need to. What you can do is find out what gives you energy, check it against tools and other people’s stories, then use it daily, in new ways, aimed at goals that matter to you. Manage the weaknesses that could really hurt you, and lean on other people for the rest.
The research isn’t perfect. A lot of it is correlational and some of it comes from companies with something to sell. But the controlled studies point the same way: doing something new with your strengths, regularly, makes a measurable difference to how you feel.
Take the assessment this week. Send five people that one-line question. Then start using one strength in a new way tomorrow morning. If you want more practical guides like this, browse the rest of our self-improvement articles.
