When your strengths become your weaknesses

Behind The Glass with Charlotte Eriksson

I know a lot of you also left your home town, or even home country, to move out in the world and change your dream, whatever that might be. I guess we all have reasons for leaving, or running away. A big reason for me was that growing up, I never felt like I had people around me who I actually looked up to. I didn’t see an adult person doing anything impressive to me. No one who lived in a way that made me excited to also grow up and take on life. I saw adults around me who were uninspired and uninspiring. They were living lives that I did not want to take on. Young as I was, I fled to the books. In books I found inspiring breathtaking extraordinary people, real and fictional, but who were so defined, in a way. Even if it was a quiet small poet, like, I discovered the American poet jack Gilbert and loved his poems but even more the fact that he fled the limelight in America when he became a little bit famous and moved to Europe and lived in kind of random hidden places, quietly, simply, just writing. He lived on a small island in Greece called Paros, where I actually later on went to spend a few weeks myself. He lived in Denmark and Germany, and just quietly wandered and wrote. I was inspired by that. What a wonderful way to live.
Of course I also discovered Jack Kerouac. Reading On The Road was my ticket out in the world. You can leave and live on the road and not chase material success but float from experience to experience and live with no belonging and just soak up the blue sky???? WHAT? It was mind blowing. I was in awe. ....
... A great leader will be aware of his or her own strengths and understand when they are useful and when they are not useful. The dark side of their strengths will show when those strengths are used in the wrong context. So let’s say again this new leader took on his or her team with the same energy and independence and stubbornness as he or she did while climbing up to that position. He or she would then become a very harsh, critical, judgmental leader. That’s when strengths become weaknesses.
Another example, in my own life. My strengths are pretty similar to this example. I’m independent, I don’t need anybody to make things happens. I make things happen myself. I believe in my own ability to learn and figure thing out and I count on myself to always make it work. I believe these are strengths, that I am proud of.
But let’s place me in a context of a relationship. And let’s place those strengths inside of a relationship, and I say to my person: I don’t need anyone. I don’t need anyone or anything to make myself happy and to build my life and I can do this all on my own.
Yeah—
Strengths used in the wrong context will become your weaknesses.
So what I have learned, a huge huge game change of a lesson, is that my strongest strengths, need to be my biggest awareness point, because let’s place me in that relationship, knowing I am independent and strong and don’t really need this person. I need to be aware of how I let those strengths shine through. I don’t mean suppress them, I need turn them around. How can I instead, turn them into terms like: Stability. You can count on me. Loyalty. I will not let you down. I got your back, just like I have mine. If things get rough, you can count on me to not give up. Because I never give up. See, if I can learn to be aware of my strengths, and learn to be aware and conscious of how I communicate them in certain context, they can stay strengths. But if I am unaware of them, they will become my weaknesses.
Being independent inside of relationship. I am still using my strong, independent never-giving-up attitude, but in a gentler way. Saying, “I’m not giving up on you and or me or this. You can count on me.”
What are your strengths? If you would ask your friends, what do you think they would say? Then ask yourself, in what context, if you’re being really honest to yoursel