CARY MULLEN uses his Winning Insights blog to talk about how focusing on your strengths will help you succeed:
Winning Tips:
1. Look for what you are doing well. Analyze it, celebrate it and you will be better able to replicate it.
2. Focus on your future opportunities instead of dwelling on what did not happen in the past. When we concentrate on leveraging what we have learned, we are better able to have optimal performance the next time we do something.
Newspaper and television reporters surrounded me. Lights flashed, microphones buzzed. “You came in second,” a reporter said pointing his microphone in my direction. “Doesn’t it make you mad to come in second again? Aren’t you discouraged by losing the top podium in the World Cup Downhill Championships by three hundredths of a second”
“Yes,” I admitted. “I am disappointed.”
I was happy to be on the World Cup podium for the second time but winning first place would have been great. “I am also encouraged,” I told them.
“What do you mean?” The reporter asked clearly confused by my optimism.
“I made some mistakes today,” I said. “But I also know that I did a lot of things right. I know that I can correct the mistakes that I made today and improve on my run tomorrow.”
You see, I had learned a lesson years before when I was at the US National Championships in Winter Park, Colorado. I learned the importance of focusing on strengths vs. weaknesses. During that race, I won the final training run despite making a few mistakes. That evening, I spent hours visualizing my errors and many more hours watching and assessing the video so that I could eliminate all of my errors the next day. The following day, I absolutely nailed the areas where I had made errors the day before, but I also totally blew sections where I had done well the day before. Crossing the finish line knowing that I had no hope of winning the race, I immediately realized what had happened. You see, the night before, I had only focused all of my attention on learning what I had done wrong. By not crystallizing the things I did well, I stopped doing them. Right then and there I made a deliberate decision to focus on my strengths as well as my weaknesses when I assessed my performance.
Why is it so easy for us to focus on what is wrong? Perhaps part of it comes from our Western society that encourages critical thinking andplaces emphasis on solving problems, even coming up with terms like “gap management”. Maybe our emphasis on problems is there because focusing on fixing what is wrong feels like the “real work”, where focusing on strengths (dare I say celebrating strengths) feels fluffy and not worth our time. Regardless,this problem-based paradigm is a hard one to shift out of. As easy as it is to slip into old habits of improving our areas of weakness, the risk is that we cannot fully optimize our performances unless we’re conscious of what we are doing well. Recognizing both our strengths and weaknesses helps us to succeed faster.
Imagine a chef who has focused so intently on improving his sauce for this amazing soufflé that he forgets to take the soufflé out of the oven on time and it falls. Suddenly, it doesn’t matter how good the sauce is – it has no foundation on which to be enjoyed. If that same chef only recognizes his less than perfect sauce, he might never acknowledge all the other things that he does amazingly well. As he becomes more and more discouraged, he may find his confidence waning not only in his soufflé, but in every dish that he cooks. The exact same phenomenon happens to us. When we only focus on what we are doing wrong, we skew our perspective of our talent. We limit our ability to take our performance to the next level. Worse, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to feel great about ourselves along the way.
Oh, you might be wondering what happened after I won second place in the World Cup Downhill. Well that evening, I spent half my time focusing on my mistakes and the other half of the evening recognizing what I had done right, really concentrating on how I could build upon the successes of the day’s run. The next day, I won first place in the race by a mere five one hundredths of a second. (And the press conference this time around was much more fun!) I ask you, how is this pattern of focusing on your flaws showing up in your life? Are you ignoring your strengths? When is the last time that you really recognized your successes so that you could repeat them? I challenge you to take the time to not only work on your weaknesses - that is the easy part - but to also spend the same amount of time recognizing what you do well.
excerpted from "Winning Insights" May 6, 2010
For more information on former Olympian and World Cup Champion Cary Mullen, click here.