Stop Identifying With Your Weaknesses
The path to self-development really has a lot to do with transforming your weaknesses into strengths instead.
I’ve always found therapy to be quite amazing — you go there in desperate need to figure out your issues and traumas, yet after accomplishing so you do everything in your power to try to reverse the way you perceive yourself. Or to accept yourself as who you are and start from there.
When you come to think about it, we all tell a certain story about ourselves to the world.
Some people try to desperately seek others’ approval in terms of the things they do. Others choose a slightly different approach — they deliberately diminish their acknowledgments, hoping that someone would point them out for them. A third group chooses to define themselves mainly by a mishap that happened ages ago and never dare to end this cycle of self-fulfilled toxicity.
When you come to think about it, many people choose to identify themselves with their weaknesses — be it stubbornness, laziness, sadness, despair, procrastination, etc. I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard hundreds of people describing themselves as “someone who fails to deliver”, “someone who frequently misses deadlines”, and “someone who is too afraid of failure”. At first, it may appear that those people are just brutally honest individuals who had their fair share of self-exploration. Sure, that’s true, but it also tells us another thing — that perhaps those people’s focus is not where it should be in the first place.
What’s with the self-diminishing attitude anyway?
The majority of people have lived through trauma or some catastrophic turn of events. It’s rather naive to think that we are the only ones having a hard time — many research state that, when asked, the majority of people don’t feel overall happy and fulfilled. The truth is, we all experience hardship — that’s why it’s very important to express kindness toward everybody every time but that’s a topic for another discussion.
In today’s article, I wanted to focus on the subject of the self-diminishing attitude many people adopt. Have you ever wondered why so many people choose to think about themselves in a negative way? One possible reason may particularly surprise you.
At first, we may think that it has to do with low self-esteem or disability to express or feel self-love. I’m not saying that those reasons are not valid — by all means, they could be somewhat true. All I’m saying is that perhaps there could a different, even deeper reason behind this self-destructive behavior. Because, in reality, yes — it is indeed self-destructing to constantly diminish yourself and your achievements.
There’s this thing with a person’s never-ending goal of feeling comfortable. If you have experienced difficulties or shortcomings in the past, there is a high chance you’ve developed and got used to a certain state of comfort in staying in the feeling for as long as possible. What I mean is that oftentimes people who used to frequently feel sad or lacking courage simply get used to the feeling — and we all know that what’s familiar often becomes comfortable. Even though sometimes this state of being could be indeed the source of our continuous discontent.
It takes courage to move past our weaknesses and focus on our strengths
Perhaps you might be one of the lucky ones who manage to realize this pattern of thinking early on and engage in changing your own personal life narrative.
Just because you’ve experienced hardships in the past, doesn’t mean that you should bring in the same feeling of inadequacy all along. The best thing you can do is to face your shortcomings and trauma, accept that they happened, and try your best to change the way they affect you in the present day.
Weaknesses and shortcomings have this enlightening effect to teach us many lessons and help us further develop our inner selves. Perhaps that’s the most direct way in which weakness can quickly transform into a strength. Essentially, that’s what you are about to focus on.
When you come to think about it, it’s our strengths that mostly define us as the individuals we in fact are. Sadness transforms into wisdom; procrastination transforms into a stronger need for rest and work-life balance; failure transforms into an experience and knowing better the next time around. This never-ending course of self-growth is what ultimately empowers us to get to the end point of our life journey.
And for every person, this endpoint could be an entirely different spot: some can dream about having their own family; others can dream about meeting their significant other; others may lust over career heights and professional success, etc. The list goes on and on and it’s entirely individual for each and every one of us. There is no right or wrong list of dreams. What’s more, there’s just a proper way for achieving what we’ve desired all along.
From my experience, the best way to do so is to focus on your strengths as they are truly transformed weaknesses. But when you change the perspective, you get an entirely different approach to any situation. What once used to scare you and stop you from taking action can today be the trigger for your next steps in self-growth.
In a nutshell
Every self-developing journey is difficult in its own way but what we should always keep in mind is maintaining the focus on the right things. If you continue to diminish yourself and your acknowledgments due to past mishaps, the chances are you’re always finding a reason not to do something. On the contrary, when you turn weaknesses into strengths and focus on your endurance and agility in any situation, there is a high chance you’ll achieve so much more. If anything, you’ll finally set yourself free.
