Focus on your strengths to overcome your weaknesses

We all have a lot to learn from professional athletes, mainly their mindset when preparing for a big competition. Since 2011 I’ve been physically active, and after my 100 lbs weight loss transformation (from 2011 to 2012), I started adopting an athlete mindset when getting ready for competition. With time I noticed that I could also apply many of those principles in business and in my professional career. The principle of continuous improvement was one of those. As an athlete, you always want to see progress towards achieving the goals that were established. Same thing happens in your professional life, you want to keep getting better as professional. Part of this narrative was documented in the Ready, Set, Achieve book that I published in 2015. This book was forwarded by Greg McCoy, a great personal trainer, coach, entrepreneur that I met in 2011 here in Dallas. We’ve been working together for eight years, and now we are finally starting to work on this book, which the working title is shown below:

We have lots of things to share in this book, but one of the things that we believe is critical is to focus on your strengths to overcome your weaknesses. Greg and I led of at least six body transformation challenges, which although were hosted in the DFW area, we had participants from all over the world. During our meetings and interactions with them, we noticed that the ones that were more successful following the plan and excelling in their activities were the ones that were focusing on what they did better to keep them motivated, getting better and eventually overcoming areas that they were struggling in the beginning. On top of that, our approach to guide them were always to lead the conversation by emphasizing where they were doing well.

In my 26 years working in the IT field, I noticed the exactly contrary. I noticed that some managers or mentors, approach their employees/mentee by leading the conversation emphasizing where they need to improve. The likelihood that the rest of the conversation will not be productive is very high. Let’s use the diagram below as an example:

The blue square represents all great things that this person did, the red square represents the areas of improvement.

If your mentor uses Approach A when talking to you, the chances that by the end of the conversation you will feel discouraged and thinking that you did everything wrong, are higher. Your motivation will be lower, and you probably will not even listen (really listen) what you did good. But, when you use Approach B, and you actually spend more time focusing on what the person did good, that person will be motivated to do more, and by the time you come up with the improvements that need to be done, that person will be ready to overcome those weaknesses. I observed this during all transformation challenges that I co-lead with Greg. I even tried to use Approach A just to see what would happen, and I validated my hypothesis – it was a disaster. In summary: if you want to kill's someone's motivation to improve, use Approach A.

In the article Placing a Focus on Emphasizing Strengths, Not Overcoming Weaknesses, the author mentioned a research that suggests that focusing more on strengths might be a better use of managers’ time and a better source of inspiration for success for employee. I ALWAYS thought about this, and I never understood managers/mentors that spent most of the time in a meeting emphasizing “what you didn’t do”, instead of focusing on the things “you did it well”. Focusing on strengths is something that professional sport coaches do a lot, and they get their athletes to perform at the high level based on that foundational principle.

Well, this is only one of the subjects that we plan to cover deeply in this book, there are lots of things to talk about, and we are super excited for this new journey that is starting now.