subject: Seeking Your Identity As Part Of Self Development [print this page] Personal development is important in the process of achieving professional and personal goals. Probably you are looking to qualify for an advanced level of your career or you want to enter into another career altogether. Maybe you are working to gain knowledge and skills for a certain job, or just for personal development of knowledge. Whatever the reason, you can achieve your wishes if you put your mind to it, but first, you have to know yourself better.
Before you set out to understanding yourself better, you must know your own strengths and weaknesses. It is part of seeking your identity and becoming aware of your own self. In their book Now Discover Your Strengths, Buckingham and Clifton posit that, Each persons greatest room for growth is in the areas of his or her greatest strength.
For you to understand the areas of your strengths and weaknesses, you should use various effective methods of self-inquiry. These will reveal to you what you are good at doing and what you can improve on as part of developing your personality. The following are ways of seeking identity as part of self-development.
What is it that you are good at?
Every person is good at doing something. Whether it is fixing engines, athletics, teaching others, cookery or physics, you are always good at doing something, and you do it best. By asking yourself this question, you will evaluate and observe your past trends to find what interested you most and what you have been doing with ultimate ease. This will help you find out or discover where your strength lies in terms of abilities.
What are not you good at?
This is similar to your weaknesses. Weaknesses are things you are not strong in, you are not comfortable doing, find yourself bored doing them, ineffective and sometimes frustrated when working on them. It is easy to identify these things when you keep making a list. Weaknesses contrast with your strengths.
Normally, you will find that you have more strengths than weaknesses, and this will definitely exceed your expectations or assumptions. You can find out more about your weaknesses and strengths through other people opinions and assessments. However, these should not be your primary source of information for conclusion.
Once you identify your strong points and weak ones, it is easier to make decisions like what career you want to pursue, developing your interests and strong points while working to improve on relevant areas that you are still weak in. It is like the preliminary step in enhancing your personal development.
