5 Ways To Identify Your Entrepreneurial Strengths
To succeed in business, one must know their strengths and play to them. It is important to take time to reflect on and develop your unique strengths (skills, talents, passions, character traits). When you do this, you will find more flow, passion, meaning and therefore success in anything you work to achieve.
Some people are good with numbers or coding. Others are good at leading or teaching or working with people. What are you good at? What comes naturally to you?
There are many kinds of entrepreneurial strengths you can have. There are two main types of skills in this larger domain that include soft skills and hard skills.
Soft Skills: These include skills and attributes that support you in being able to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people. These skills involve being able to interact with others in a meaningful and successful way and enables you to manage and contribute positively to your work or personal space.
Hard Skills: These involve more technical or teachable abilities that can be measured and defined. Hard skills are connected to the training you have taken and areas of school you particularly enjoyed and succeed in such as copywriting, video editing, marketing, graphic design, project management, accounting, data analysis, etc.
5 Ways To Identify Your Strengths
- Identify Soft Skills
As mentioned, your soft skills are the non-technical or intangible talents that individuals and entrepreneurs possess. These skills are connected to your attitude, intuition, and ability to connect with and communicate with others. Soft skills help you connect with clients, customers, and partners. They help you in being able to share your ideas and help you reach success.
Examples of soft skills include:
- Leadership
- Optimism
- Resilience
- Flexibility
- Problem Solving
- Emotional Intelligence
- Communication skills
- Character Strengths
- Identify Hard Skills
Your hard skills involve your job-specific abilities or knowledge that has been gained through education, training, or hands-on experience. They involve either technical skills that are needed to perform certain jobs or a general set of expertise, such as Management. Take some time to develop a list of your hard skills.
- What Comes Naturally To You?
You can identify your strengths as an entrepreneur by taking some time to reflect on the past to find out what you have always been naturally good at. If you look back to your school, past work experience and the role you play with family/friends what stands out? What have you noticed that you might get chosen to do over others in your life because people know it will be easy for you? Take some time to reflect on this, you might not think it’s a strength because it comes naturally to you.
- Assessment by Others
Once you have taken some time to identify what comes naturally to you, you can bring this list to your close friends, family, and mentors. See what they think of your list. It can also help talk to someone you know who might be familiar with soft and hard skills and have them help you identify what your top strengths are. Remember just because you know how to do something might not mean you should be doing it because it might not be your top strength.
- What do you love doing?
What do you love to do? What comes easy to you? What excites you? Identifying the things that you can lose yourself in and access a state of flow can help you identify your top strengths. Flow is a positive psychology concept that involves falling into a state where you lose space and time, you zone in completely to what you are doing that everything else disappears.
It is important to identify your own unique strengths that will help you in your business or career. In doing this you also learn your limitations and when you need to outsource or get support from people who might excel in the areas you struggle with. We cannot be good at everything, it is important to put your energy into what you excel at so you can set yourself up for success.