How Knowing Your Strengths Can Help You Be Happier at Work

How well do you know your strengths?
How are you using them to become happier in your career?
Kathryn Britton has written a fascinating post on the Positive Psychology Daily blog, about how to use your knowledge of your strengths to make changes in your job that are going to feel good.
She cites Marcus Buckingham’s new book, Go, Put Your Strengths to Work and his summer teleclass series as inspirations.

My favorite tidbits and suggestions:

• Observe yourself for one week, writing down the specifics periodically of what you loved doing and what you loathed.
• Translate this knowledge into several strength and weakness statements and post them.
• Each week plan to spend more time using your strengths and less time in your areas of weakness.
• Swap tasks with someone else if you can so that both of you end up using your strengths more.

I love that this process is incremental and that it acknowledges that what is one person’s hateful task may be another person’s joy.
Before you decide that you absolutely must leave your current job or career, be sure you’ve got a crystal clear idea of your strengths and that you’ve done all you can to create opportunities to use them.
If you’re searching for a new job and thoroughly understand your strengths, your resume and job interviews will be the better for it. And you’ll be in a good position to select the job that will be a great fit.
By Heather Mundell and courtesy of CareerHub.com. The Career Hub blog connects job seekers with experts in career counseling, resume writing, personal branding and recruiting.