Understand Yourself
Understand yourself to maximize your value and fulfillment!
When you know who you are, it is much clearer to understand how you can stand out and maximize your potential. This is a critical first step in figuring out what things you should and shouldn’t be doing. Without knowing yourself, the temptation to compare or copy what others are doing can be extremely detrimental. By understanding your own unique self you’ll gain confidence in what areas to focus so that you can be successful. This is your own personal selling proposition and its the critical foundation for all important future decisions!
But where do you start? Start with understanding your values.
You beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, yours words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, your values become your destiny. -Mahatma Gandhi
Your values should dictate your actions, actions will then dictate emotions and then these influence your thoughts. Actions, emotions and thoughts are all related and they are guided by your own personal values. Think of values as the lighthouse guiding you. As long as your actions align with your values, emotions and thoughts will fall into place. This will give you vigor, you’ll feel alive and excited about the work you’re doing, which ultimately will lead to success!
Subconsciously, you probably know your values. Writing them down and knowing for sure what they are is another story. It can be challenging! I found this online test to be really useful and accurate. It costs $20 and takes about 50 minutes, and it’s a fantastic investment to make on yourself. Values Profile Test
Once you’ve figured out your values, its time to understand your strengths. This is best done in a variety of ways. Take a close look at significant experiences, both good and bad. These significant experiences can shed light on what you are really good at and what you aren’t. You can also take personality and strength tests, ask others what they think, read performance reviews you’ve been given. Take it all together and a picture of your own strengths will become more clear.
Are you still a little unclear? Here’s a book I’ve taken a myriad of strength based tests, and this is the one I’ve found the most useful. I’ve take it three times over the course of ten years and my results were identical!
Grab a copy of yours here!
Aim to have a clear and concise list of your strengths (5-10 is ideal). Then really think about the single strength that speaks to you most. Its likely this strength will also align nicely with your value system. Take this one strength and focus on it the most! This one strength will help you maximize your full potential. My values and strengths I have to be honest – I didn’t start this journey by understanding my own value system. Intuitively I understood them but they were always hard to verbalize; I’m sure you can relate. Knowing your values is hard, and it took me years of life experiences to figure out. I took and thought through the results to understand myself.VALUES
Wisdom – Understanding, intelligence, good judgement, intuition, personal growth, innovation, approach to work is logical, efficient, and well thought out
Realistic – Productiveness and usefulness, achieving an efficient return on investment of time, money and effort. Practical, reasonable, and think actions through before acting
Empathy – Understanding the needs and sufferings of others
Aesthetics – Creative, unusual way of thinking, and want the environment that they surround themselves with to be reflective of that. Things need to be aesthetically pleasing.
Love – Patience, kindness, trust, forgiveness, compassion
Integrity – Honesty, truthfulness, reliability, justice, sincerity
If you want to invest in yourself, start with understanding your values. It has helped me immensely in deciding the best career path to take; product management! Product Managers must be innovative, logical and think things through (Wisdom). They need to be aware of the ROI for all of their team’s efforts (Realistic). Their number one job is to understand their customers (Empathy). They also must have a keen product sense of what makes certain products stand out (Aesthetics, Wisdom and Empathy). While managing teams they must be able to earn trust (Integrity) and be kind and thoughtful to the needs of their teams (Love). With this in mind, some of the core traits that make good product managers are also a part of my core value system, therefore it should be a good fit.
STRENGTHS and NATURAL ABILITIES
Contrary to values, I’ve been keenly aware of my own strengths for a long time. Early in my career I had a fantastic manager who helped his whole team by having them take several strength and abilities tests. We went offsite to better understand these which you’ve probably done too. At first I thought the results were interesting, but years later I took one of those test again. To my surprise the results were identical! Not only that, but I was asked to take the test yet again even more years later and the results were the same the third time! So, I’m a big believer in this test and the power of focusing on your strengths while minimizing your weaknesses. Here is that book. They’ll even provide a personalized action plan. Get it!!!
So what are my strengths? See below. I’ve also included a “natural abilities” list that is a combination of several other tests that gave me even more insight.
The one strength that intrigued me the most was individualization. Most of my other strengths do a great job of explaining why I’ve had so much success in various product development and cross-functional leadership roles. Certainly this strength of individualization played a part, but it’s the one strength that I always seem to think about and notice. Somehow I’m able to put myself in another person’s shoes easily. I can understand them and anticipate what they want or need. It seems like a unique strength to have and therefore I decided to focus on that the most and make it my “selling point”. Taking action to understand another’s view falls nicely in line with my value of empathy, so I believe this is a really strong strength to use as a differentiator.
Wrapping things up, if you can figure out what you values are, what you natural strengths and abilities are, you’ll truly understand yourself! You won’t compare yourself to others as that will be unproductive. They have their own strengths and you have yours. So what are your own personal values? Do you live by them on a daily basis? And what are your strengths? Do you currently work towards maximizing them? If you’re finding success in life you are! I’d love to hear from you below!