Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threat are Misnomers

Strength, weakness, opportunity and threat are relative terms. They are meaningful only in a particular context or situation. Furthermore, your so called strength may become a weakness in another situation. The Chinese like to say that within any crisis there is always the opportunity. It is up to you to find the opportunity. In other words, you hold the key to what is strength, weakness, opportunity or threat. 

Call it Charactertics and Not Strength or Weakness
A better way to help you is to think in terms of your characteristics, your personality traits, such as DISC or MBTI etc depending on the school you subscribed to, rather than of strengths and weaknesses. Whether your particular characteristic is a strength or a weakness is dependent on the situation.

The Secret for Success
So if you want to succceed in life, you choose to work in only those situation where your traits become strengths.

Outsource Your Weakness when Situation Change
However, many things in life are beyond your control. The situation is likely to change such that your previous strength becomes a weakness. What can you do? Then you outsource your weakness to someone with that strength. You get someone, by hiring or partnering with, someone with the strength to complement your weakness.
Or you can leave the job and find a new one where your a particular trait is strength again.
Of course, we can also try to learn and develop. However, we need to spend enough effort to make up our 'weakness' to accepatble level and spend more effort to develop our particular traits.

Summary - Know Self, Know Others and Partnering with Complementary Traits
Choose the situation where our traits become strengths and develop our strengths while at the same time outsource our weaknesses to others with the complementary strengths. It is about choosing, developing and partnering for success in life.

Before you think that your choice is limited, it is important to note that studies on the matching of job types and personality traits have not significant correlerations. i.e. Successful sales executives are not just those people with Influence (I of DISC) personality trait. Even the intervert Compliance (C of DISC) type can be successful Sales Executive if he know how to partner with complementary traits. The secret for success is then about knowing yourself knowing others and forming partnership and working with others of complementary traits.

Lim Liat (c) 1 May 2014