Be Willing To Show Your Strengths

In order to gain influence, you have to be comfortable showing your strengths to others. You have to be willing to step up as you stand out. If you want to be great at what you do, you have to be comfortable with who you are. In order to outperform your limiting beliefs, you have to gain confidence in yourself. If you don’t value yourself, you will never see value in what you do, and others won’t see the value in you.

Showing your strengths requires courage. In fact, the word courage comes from the French word Coeur, meaning heart. Courage comes from our heart. It takes heart to be a strengths-driven leader. In order to show your creative potential you have to display the courage to step out and be seen. You will never reach the fullness of your potential if you hide your abilities. Fear demolishes creative power.

The reason many people aren’t willing to show their unique strengths is because of insecurity. But it backfires on them. The more insecure a person is, the less courage they have, thus creating a vortex of fear. When courage gets low, so does creative potential. The ability to use your strengths requires you to become vulnerable. People will have opinions about your work, but you can’t let that keep you from showing it to others. Too many people are paralyzed by their insecurities and fear. They have great ideas and creative talents, but hide them away never to be seen. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said, “Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think.”

Here are 3 tips to start releasing your creative potential…

1. Stop Being A Perfectionist

Perfectionism will always tell you you’re not ready. It literally stalls progress to the point of death. Break this paralyzing effect by pulling the trigger of courage. Nothing is ever quite perfect anyway, so stop waiting for it to be. If your willing to show your work, even if it’s not perfect, you will learn how to perfect it. You can’t improve a result until you get a result, so just let it go and learn from it…then make it better. Perfectionism kills productivity. Perfectionism causes paralysis, which causes procrastination, which causes problems. If you wait to do something until it’s perfect, you will never do anything. Innovators are the ones who started with what they had and made it better over time.

If you are always criticizing your work, you will eventually give up in despair. Critical thinking is good, critical judgment is bad. Most creative people are not happy with what they’ve done, but they do it anyway. Yes, we always need to be getting better and challenging ourselves, but for goodness sake ease up on your criticism. Learn to be at peace with your creative efforts. It may not be the best, but it is your best at the moment. Learn from it and make it better, but own what you can do.

2. Embrace Humility

Pride can keep people from showing their work. They become embarrassed by what they’ve done and allow a negative pride to control them. Humility is a prerequisite to creativity. If you aren’t willing to throw yourself out there, you’ll never experience the thrill of making a difference. Understand that you are who you are, and you can only do what you can do…embrace the willingness to be real. Successful people aren’t perfect, they’re just willing to throw themselves out there.

Scientific American held a contest for the best explanation of Einstein’s theory of relativity in 3,000 words or less. Einstein said, “I’m the only one in my circle of friends who is not entering. I don’t know if I could do it.” He truly knew the power of humility. Be humble about your strengths, but be willing to say yes to opportunities that will show them. Author C.S. Lewis said, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.”

3. Don’t Be Afraid To Fail

Failure is not bad unless you make it bad. Failure can actually be the best thing that happens to you. You can see it as a roadblock or a stepping stone…your choice. If you see it as a roadblock, you will avoid it at all cost and eventually come to fear it. However, if you see it as a stepping stone, you’ll be free to try new things and learn from it as you become better as a result of it. Failure is not fatal, it is simply part of the growth process to success. The longer you wait to show your strengths because of fear, the longer it will be until you make the difference you want to make.

When we stop moving forward for fear of having a bad experience, we waste the possibility of having a great experience. The key to overcoming failure is to keep our eyes forward. Everyone has faced, is facing, or will face failures in their life. The question is not, “Will I ever fail?” The question is, “How will I respond to failure?” Every failure brings with it a seed of success, but we must extract the growth lessons from our failures in order to learn from them. If you allow failure to keep you down, you will miss out on great opportunities. Author Tim Fargo said, “Analyze your mistakes. You’ve already paid the tuition, you might as well get the lesson.”