The description in the above title can be avoided with this important process, “Maximize Your Strengths”. You will be shown the significance of this process, its steps as well as the rationale behind some steps in this article.

It is common for people to want to maximize their strengths. The common approach is to focus on developing skills that they show to be talented in. Apart from strengths related to specific skills like playing a sports, presenting a topic, developing a software, designing an art, etc, strengths can also be related to personal qualities like being a fast learner, having strong resilience, ability to connect the dots, exhibiting charismatic influence, etc. This article emphasises on the latter.

This process of maximizing your strengths related to personal qualities involves uncovering the underlying personality traits behind those strengths. This allows you to exhibit those underlying traits not just more intentionally, but also appropriately, to prevent your strengths from becoming an obstacle. The uncovered traits can then point you towards other strengths that you exhibit all along, yet unaware of.

Truth is, it is impossible for anyone to be totally clear with one's strengths and the underlying traits behind those strengths. After all, the average person is only approximately 2% conscious. In other words, most of us have 2% of our thoughts (logical/emotional/etc) surface enough for us to easily be aware of their existence. The other 98% requires us to dig deeper into imploring ourselves in order to bring them to awareness. This process of self imploring allows us to maximize our strengths related to personal qualities.

Compile a list of strengths you have. These strengths from the list can come from both past & present, as well as both your own & others' perception of you.

Choose one of your strengths, on your list, that comes up strongly to you. Come up with contributing current traits (or repeating behavior/thoughts/feelings/etc) to form a list of correlating traits for this particular strength. Keep going through this process until you feel satisfied with the list you have or until you have exhausted the traits that you can come up with. Reflect on how these traits correlate to your chosen strength.

From here, set an intention for yourself to maximize that strength by mentally aligning the things that are necessary. These things that require alignment include the chosen strength, the list of correlating traits, and the correlation between the traits and the strength, etc.

After setting the intention to maximize that strength, is the part that most people, coaches included, miss out. This is a very crucial part that prevents your strength contributing traits from becoming your obstacle. If this part was not in place to begin with, the implication would be possibly an inappropriate exhibition of your strength contributing traits to hinder yourself. This part is to be non-attached to the underlying strength contributing traits.

At this point, in case you start feeling that you are contradicting yourself by setting an intention to maximize your strengths and being non-attached to the underlying contributing traits, you need to recognize that there is a fine line between exhibiting a personality trait / personal quality / characteristics / etc and being overly attached to the personality trait / personal quality / characteristics / etc. Using the analogy of holding on to a handgun to defend oneself and one's loved ones against potential external threats, if this person is overly attached to his handgun to the extreme of having to hold on to it with the muzzle pointed such that he is ready to reposition his hand to open fire, not just his daily routines with both himself and his loved ones get hindered, he is likely to send contradicting messages to his loved ones whenever he reaches out a helping hand with a handgun pointed at them. By being non-attached to his need to hold on to his handgun ready to open fire at any moment, he can more rationally assess the situations in the appropriateness of holding on to his handgun while possessing it.

The analogy in the previous section can be used to understand why within your strengths lie your obstacles. That is very common in any tool that is a double-edged sword. A handgun, for example, can both protect one and one’s loved ones from danger and also put one and one’s loved ones in danger. The same can be said for the type of love shown by someone with narcissistic abuse tendencies. Often times, the aggressor's way(s) of showing love gets twisted by some notions/thoughts/beliefs/past experiences/etc that he stays overly attached to despite those notions/thoughts/beliefs/past experiences/etc being no longer serving him or others with either the passage of time and/or a change in circumstances. This results in the aggressor making the victim adopt ways/opinions/styles/etc that are irrelevant to or incongruent with the victim out of love, contributing to the victim’s demise. An aggressor at present might have been a victim in the past while a victim at present can be an aggressor in future. Oftentimes, the aggressor and the victim share a relationship such that they are parent and child, teacher and student, trainer and trainee, superior and subordinate, mentor and mentee, etc. Just as holding on to something in a non-attached manner allows yourself and your loved ones to be free from being held back by whatever you hold on to, holding on to your relevant strength contributing traits in a non-attached manner allows you to better show those traits in appropriate manners and during appropriate times.

After setting intention to be non-attached to your relevant strength contributing traits, identify more strengths from these traits and add them to your list of strengths compiled at the beginning of this process.

This concludes one cycle of the strengths maximization process. The cycle can then be repeated for as many times as needed in one shot or throughout multiple sessions spread over a period, by either recycling the updated list of strengths from the previous cycle or going through the process of listing out your strengths again, to the point of satisfaction or a point of your strengths no longer being updated when going through this process. Generally, going through another cycle within one sitting would lead you to recycling the updated list of strengths from the previous cycle you just underwent. Going through a first cycle from a subsequent session can start off with you either referring to the updated list of strengths at the end of your previous session, or going through the process of listing out your strengths again. Should you choose the latter, it does not mean that your previous efforts put into your strengths’ clarification process are wasted. Instead, the experience from your previous session would probably allow you to rephrase your strengths in ways that better serve you.  

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