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Your Strength is Your Strengths

The last three days, I have been on the Coldwell Banker Sales Rally and Roadshow, something I haven’t done in maybe 13 years. While it was a nice opportunity to take a trip down memory lane with some old friends and also meet new ones, it was mostly a chance to talk about one of my favorite topics: your strengths, and why they are so important in your business.

It’s unfortunate that so many people choose to either focus on their weaknesses OR allow others to do that to them. Your strengths are the best of you. They represent YOU, at the top of your game. Maybe we’re talking about skills, characteristics, expertise, or maybe just those things about which you are passionate.

I suppose there are basically three steps in utilizing your strengths to catapult your business: identification, examination, outreach. L:et’s go one at a time.

1. Identification. This is touchy. To identify our strengths, we must first be self aware enough to know what they are. That may or may not come easy for everyone, so here are five tips to uncovering your strengths.

  • Try taking a personality test. There are countless online sites to aid in seeing where we might excel. Here are five random possibilities: The DISC profile (https://www.123test.com/disc-personality-test/), the EQ-i 2.0 Emotional Intelligence Assessment (https://www.eitrainingcompany.com/eq-assessment/), Booth’s 360 Leadership EI (https://boothco.com/company/about-us.php), the VIA Character Strength Assessment (https://www.viacharacter.org/), and SDI 2.0 (https://www.corestrengths.com/tsdi/).
  • Examine feedback from current and previous experiences AND focus on objective analysis of what you did well.
  • Ask Others. Sounds goofy, but who knows you better than the people closest. Ask where they think your strengths lie, and take it as a way to learn more about yourself. You may have to check your ego and/or preconceived notions at the door.
  • Failures and Successes. Examine both; your successes and your failures. Often times it is possible to discover your strengths by also examining times when things may not have went so well.
  • Consider your passions. Often we are excellent at those things about which we are most passionate. It is pretty rare that we would get too cranked up about something we suck at.

2. Once you have identified your strengths, closely look at how those strengths might help someone who works with you. If you’re a fabulous listener, how could that help the people you work with. Maybe you’re the product/market expert. Surely you can identify ways that would help someone who worked with you. Once you’ve looked at this for each of your strengths, the clearer your picture of how your strengths can clearly help others.

3. Decide what you can do to brand or market that strengths to attract more people to your business. If you remember the Dating Game, you remember that at some point contestant #2 (or #3 or #1) would be asked, “Why should I pick you?” Well, never in the Dating Game did #2 ever answer, “Pick ME? I can’t imagine why you would do that. Have you seen these other two?” Marketing, before it is ever anything else, is about Attention and Attraction. You want to get someone’e attention and attract them to your business. Only then can you ever Capture or Convert. What better magnet than your strengths.

For real estate agents, I like to use an exercise like the one below. I am sure it could be tweaked for any person or business. It will help walk you through the steps to making the strength rubber meet the action road.

When you are able to deploy hard work against your strengths, you have increased your chances of success BY A BUNCH!!! You are able to employ more of a downstream effort to your work and life and avoid the upstream effort that causes so much of this, try harder, work more, never let up BS.

Get on to your strengths! Let them be the thing that catapults you to the next level.