I find that it is important to be passionate and to get involved in as many things as possible. My goal has always been to learn from experiences and people. Striving to be better but nonetheless appreciating where I am in life has been vital to maintaining my sanity.

I am continuously working on honing my skills and developing and enhancing my competencies. This (hopefully!) empowers me to influence changes and improvements in my environment. I am inherently curious and I am never shy about pushing the envelope, challenging thoughts, ideas, proposals and providing input. However, I understand my limitations. In fact, I relish opportunities to better myself.

Self awareness is a key attribute that we often neglect. We are habitually shy about our limitations when we need to be embracing them. We end up trying so hard to demonstrate to others how capable we are by using our strengths that we neglect to make the conscious effort to understand and improve on our weaknesses. This leads to stressful situations where you can be “out of bounds”, out of context or worse: engaging in a battle of wits while being unarmed. We can end up looking foolish.

Self awareness, especially the knowledge and comprehension of our weaknesses will lead to having more confidence in your abilities, simply because you understand what you can and cannot bring to the table. Understanding your weaknesses means that you work harder to overcome them, and therefore can concentrate on them in times of learning and development.

Here are some of my daily reminders that are helping me turn my weaknesses into strengths:

Perspective
You don’t know what I know and I don’t know what you know. In other words, never assume that someone will “think like me” and will understand right away where you’re going in with a proposal.

Listen
Before getting on your soap box, make sure everyone is talking about the same thing. This will save time and allow everyone to concentrate their efforts constructively.

Be honest
Take the information, digest it, reflect and then respond. If you are not able to contribute to a certain subject or element, don’t. Speaking just to “fill the air” will negatively impact your credibility in the long run.

I would not go on a shopping spree without knowing how much money I have in the bank. So why go through life without understanding yourself? Understanding your strengths and weaknesses is vital to evolution and professional development.

- Martin Bertrand
Connect with Martin taima_bertrand@hotmail.com