When is a Weakness Not a Weakness? It’s Not What You Think!
I’m a huge proponent of Strengths Based Parenting, a parenting approach championed by Gallup through their StrengthsFinder program. The basic idea in Strengths Based Parenting is that children are at their best when you empower them to do what they’re best at, and that’s using their strengths.
In addition, a child’s strengths are found in what they truly love to do, their areas of natural talents and passions. As a result, if a parent wants their child to reach their full potential, they’re better off focusing on a child’s strengths instead of dwelling on their weaknesses.
This does not mean you should ignore a weakness. As I stated in my article yesterday, parents should always minimally manage weaknesses so they don’t get in the way of goals. But that’s it. Research shows it’s very unlikely that a weakness can be turned into a strength. However, how do you know for sure that a weakness is a weakness?
Defining a Weakness in the Context of Strengths
The first thing to remember is that weaknesses are things that get in the way of goals. So if you don’t have any goals, then you really can’t have weaknesses. What you have instead is a non-talent.
Non-talents are those attributes that aren’t innate. Simply stated, some people are born with special gifts and others are not. However, just because someone wasn’t born with the gift to sing for example, doesn’t make not having the ability to sing a weakness.
Whereas strengths come from investing in talents to help you reach a goal, weaknesses come from non-talents that prevent you from reaching a goal.
So the bottom line is this, weaknesses and goals go hand and hand. A child could have a weakness in calculus when calculus is a required class to graduate. However, that weakness becomes a non-talent once they graduate and calculus is no longer a need to achieve a goal.
Furthermore, non-talents don’t need managing, they are what they are. It’s good to know a non-talent exists as far as self-awareness goes. But other than that, there is nothing wrong with just ignoring them.