A coaching client recently shared with me a simple, yet profound, concept: Your greatest weakness comes from overusing your greatest strength. It’s pulled from this longer quote:
“As with many of the dichotomies of leadership, a person’s biggest strength can be his greatest weakness when he doesn’t know how to balance it. A leader’s best quality might be her aggressiveness, but if she goes too far she becomes reckless. A leader’s best quality might be his confidence, but when he becomes overconfident he doesn’t listen to others.” – Jocko Willink, Extreme Ownership
For you, one of your greatest strengths may be performing under pressure so you procrastinate and end up creating unnecessary emergencies.
Or you may have a knack for being adaptable so you do a fantastic job reacting to everyone else’s needs but never get to your own priorities.
Or you may be a perfectionist who does work to an extremely high-quality level but then misses deadlines because you’re taking too long on projects.
As a time management coach, I help clients in all of those situations and more.
Summary
Your greatest strength, when overused or unbalanced, can become your greatest weakness. The goal isn’t to eliminate your strength. The goal is to calibrate it, so it continues to serve your best life rather than sabotage it.
Key Takeaways
- Being structured by nature caused a struggled with the unpredictability of parenting. The frustration from uncompleted plans was a signal to adapt, not push harder.
- Avoiding to-do list tunnel vision by being fully present, especially during precious moments, instead of being distracted.
Structure vs. Flexibility
As you may guess, I’m great at routines, planning and being intentional with my time, which has served me well for many years.
What I’ve discovered as I’ve made the transition to being a mom is that while these strengths are extremely helpful with children, they can also be a point of weakness.
Plans need to be much more flexible when kids are involved because what can happen that day will look radically different depending on whether my daughters take a 20-minute nap or a two-hour nap or have a blowout incident at an inopportune time.
At first, this variability would leave me feeling unaccomplished and a bit frustrated because as a planner, I always have a daily plan and could now never get it done on days I was with my girls.
But I’ve learned to let go of that frustration by getting laser clear on the top two or three things that matter most on those days. Then I count success based on those items. If I get anything else done on my to-do list, that’s a bonus but not expected.
Doing vs. Being
The second area where my strength is my greatest weakness is in potentially becoming so focused on my to-do list that I miss the moments with my daughters. Yes, I need to do the daily things to take care of our family and be a responsible human being. But I don’t want to get so busy doing the things for my girls, that I miss being with my girls.
To help combat this potential weakness, I have a few strategies. One is to define a couple of memories that I want to make with them each day. For example, go on a walk and have some focused playtime with them. Then I make those part of my to-do list.
The second is to have a joy-focused approach to our time together. At each transition and throughout our time together, I try to pause and appreciate the moments. When they wake up, I take a bit of time to just smile down on them in bed. I tickle their tummies, and enjoy that we’re happy to see each other. They smile up at me and wiggle their whole bodies, including having their head go back and forth in delight.
Throughout the times I’m with them, I try to not just go through the motions, but make it an interaction. While I’m changing diapers or getting ready for the day, I try to engage my girls as much as I can.
And in the final moments at night when they’ve fallen asleep on me before I put them down, I don’t do anything else but just hold and savor my girls. I waited over 40 years for this precious gift from God, and I don’t want to miss the moment because I’m looking at something on my phone.
Personal Reflection
How about you?
Are you overusing your greatest strength?
How could you create balance so that what’s wonderful about you stays wonderful instead of keeping you from living your most meaningful and satisfying life?
If you would like help overcoming your weakness in either over planning or under planning, please feel free to set up a consultation with me here: Elizabeth’s Consultation Schedule
I would be delighted to help you balance out your strengths.
About Real Life E
Elizabeth Grace Saunders is a time management coach and best-selling author who empowers individuals who feel guilty, overwhelmed and frustrated to feel peaceful, confident and accomplished. She helps people struggling with new levels of responsibility after receiving a promotion or becoming a parent, who aren’t meeting expectations at work, or who need better work-life balance to overcome burnout.
Elizabeth was named one of the World’s Top 30 Time Management Professionals by Global Gurus every year since 2018 and is a member of Forbes Coaches Council. McGraw Hill published her first book The 3 Secrets to Effective Time Investment: How to Achieve More Success with Less Stress. Harvard Business Review published her second book How to Invest Your Time Like Money. And FaithWords published her third book Divine Time Management. Elizabeth regularly writes time management articles for Harvard Business Review and Fast Company and has appeared on CBS, ABC, NBC, and Fox.
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