If knowing where you want to be, and establishing your personal vision, is the first step in any personal development, the next step is to understand where you are now. From this point, you can work out which areas are likely to need some work to improve your skills and abilities.

Being aware of your weaknesses enables you to take steps to start to address them. These steps may be through formal courses, working out how to use and apply your existing experience in a different way, or using everyday experiences and setbacks as a way to learn.

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Identifying Your Strengths and Weaknesses

Being aware of your strengths and weaknesses - and, indeed, wider self-awareness - is a crucial part of emotional intelligence. Without a good understanding of yourself, it is very hard to either improve, or to respond effectively to others.

Cultivating habits of reflection, self-awareness and understanding is therefore important for relationships throughout life.

There is more about this on our page: Self-Awareness.

If you are struggling to know where to start with your strengths and weaknesses, you may want to try our Interpersonal Skills Self-Assessment, or our What Kind of a Leader Are You? quiz.

It is also helpful to ask colleagues and friends if they think there are areas where you are particularly strong or weak.

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Identifying the Level of the Problem

Once you have identified the broad area of weakness or challenge that you want to work on, it can be helpful to dig a bit deeper. There are a number of ‘levels’ on which any problem can be expressed, and these will need to be addressed in different ways.

Our page on Dilts’ Logical Levels explains that there are a number of ‘logical levels’ that provide a helpful structure in which to look at problems or change. The idea is that each level affects those below, and is affected by those above. If you want to change something, you therefore need to understand the level at which it operates.

Identifying the level of the problem can help you to frame both it and a solution more effectively.

You can often identify the logical level by the language you use to describe the problem. For example, you may say:

• “I can’t do this now. It’s too noisy to concentrate.” [Environmental]
• “This is too difficult for me. I can’t do it.” [Behavioural]
• “I don’t know how to do that.” [Capability]
• “This just isn’t useful to me. I can’t be bothered to spend time on it.” [Beliefs or Values]
• “People like me don’t do things like this.” [Identity]

The key is to address the problem at the level at which you have framed it.

If you have framed it as being about your identity, it is no good trying to address it by going somewhere quiet to help you concentrate. Instead, you need to think about why you have those views about ‘people like you’, and try to unpack that a little.

Focusing on What Matters

You have now, therefore, identified some weaknesses, and also worked out at what level you have framed the problem, and the need for change.

The final step in identifying what to work on is to focus on what matters.

It is important to remember that you cannot do everything at once.

Our page on Planning Your Personal Development explains more about how to prioritise your learning, but the basic idea is to identify the areas that are both most important to you, and most need addressing now if you are to achieve your goals.

Your ideal list of areas to address should be four to five key skills or areas of knowledge. Any more, and you will start to feel overwhelmed by the task you have set yourself.

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Finally…

…remember that as you grow and develop, your list of weaknesses and strengths will change. First, you will become better at some things, but secondly, you will identify other areas that now seem important to develop. Keep your personal development under review to ensure that you keep focusing on the most important areas.

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