Developing Self-Awareness: Identifying Your Strengths and Weaknesses

Identifying Strengths and Weaknesses

This assignment is designed to help you understand yourself. In this course, you will explore who you are in terms of your personality, skills and values. Further, you will examine how you work and interact with others. In this paper, you will explore two areas of strength, two areas of weakness, and then you will develop a plan of action related to a single strength and a single weakness. It is expected that this assignment will contribute to your sense of self-awareness and thus help you to make wise choices about your future.

As part of our in-class activities, we will focus on your areas of strength. This will allow you to reflect and disclose those aspects of yourself that you feel are most likely to contribute to your abilities as a leader. Further, you will receive feedback from your peers and/or supervisors as to whether the areas of strength you identified match those perceived by others. To give you an opportunity to further explore your strengths and how you can use them to advance your career, you will select two areas of strength to discuss in this assignment.

 

In addition, you will have the opportunity to delve into your areas for growth. For this assignment you will also reflect on two areas of weakness (or areas that you would like to develop). You will be exercising self-disclosure, as you will be sharing this information with your professor. Moreover, you will receive feedback (from your professor) on your capacity to identify, and develop a plan of action related to, your areas for growth.

 

Understanding your strengths and your developmental needs should help you because a heightened sense of self-awareness should guide you to make career choices that capitalize on your strengths. The first step in this assignment is to identify two areas of strength and two for development. If you are already aware of your strengths and the areas in which you would like to
grow, then you simply need to determine whether you are using appropriate terminology to describe them. If you are uncertain of your strengths and areas for improvement, then you will begin the assignment with an exercise in self-reflection.

 

Identifying Your Strengths and Weaknesses in Academic Literature Once you have identified two strengths and two areas for growth, you should ensure that your strengths and weaknesses have been linked to the competencies associated with leadership. This will help you to see how academics writing about leadership refer to your strengths and weaknesses. Application: How have you demonstrated your strengths & weaknesses and how have they affected you?

1. Consider how you exemplify the strengths / areas for development. Provide concrete examples of how you demonstrate these strengths / weaknesses in your daily life (at work or at school).

2. Describe how each of the strengths/weaknesses impacts your performance at work and/or how it currently affects your performance at school. If you find that you cannot identify how the strength/weakness helps/hinders your performance, then re-consider why it is a strength or why you would want to improve the skill, or go back to step 1 and identify another area for development.