How your strengths will help see you through the pandemic.

Years of research tell us that those of us who know, value, and use our strengths experience greater wellbeing.  We are happier. We are more likely to see positives and opportunities in various situations. We are better able to cope with challenges and negative situations. 

The COVID-19 pandemic is mostly definitely a challenge and a negative situation. It affects everyone of us in some way. Many people are stressed and anxious, wondering how they will get through the pandemic even if they don’t get sick.  Draw on your strengths to help you go beyond merely surviving the pandemic to thriving through it.

When you focus on your strengths, you open up possibilities, create opportunities, and give yourself options. Weaknesses drag you down. Strengths build you up. 

 Yes, you can improve your weaknesses, but you can actively design your future with your strengths.  Let’s say one of your strengths is creativity. You can use that strength to come up with different ways to spend your time in our social distancing and self isolating world to keep yourself occupied and engaged in life, or to stay in touch with family and friends.  If one of your strengths is writing, make the time to record what you and your family and friends are experiencing, feeling, and doing—that will be social history that fascinates future generations. If you’re a great cook, can you make food to share with an elderly relative or neighbour?

Perhaps you’ve been laid off. What strengths can you use to change how you react and respond to that? Can you learn about something that will open career opportunities—there is tons of free learning on the internet?  Can you continue to contribute to your employer and show how valuable you are? Is this a good time to examine what you want to be when you grow up and come up with plans to achieve it?

We live in a world driven by the deficit paradigm in which most of our focus is on finding what’s wrong, fixing what’s broken, overcoming weaknesses.  By focusing on your strengths, you can shift to the strengths paradigm, looking at what works well or has in the past and telling yourself and others stories about past successes. When you do, you appreciate how much you have on which to draw, which leads to knowing your aspirations and developing your plan to achieve them.  That does NOT mean ignoring weaknesses and challenges, it means reframing them.

Reframing problems is a key aptitude of those who live in the strengths paradigm. When you reframe a problem as an opportunity for growth, it’s like unwrapping a candy to find the sweetness inside.  Every problem has at least one opportunity inside it. So, you are bored with being in self isolation—as per #1, look to your strengths to help you come up with ways of engaging in various pursuits.  Maybe you’re finding it hard to work from home with kids around all day.  Think deeply about what opportunities that might create—matching your working time to their online learning time, for example. 

Strengths aren’t just something that you’re good it.  Strengths energize you, time flies by when you’re using them.  In point 1, I mentioned writing, but if writing is not your strength, then don’t go there—that will drain you of energy.  Remember times when you felt great and happy and successful and reflect on what you were doing in those times, what strengths were you using.  Then think about how you can recreate that feeling by using those strengths now. Strengths use fosters a positive frame of mind and a positive perception of problems and how to move beyond them.

People who live strengths-based lives see strengths in others.  What are the strengths of those around you?  How can you help them recognize those strengths (research shows that most of us are not aware of our strengths because they seem so normal to us)?  Figure out how you can combine your strengths to complement each other. If you’re good a writing while another person is good at storytelling, bring those strengths together to record your pandemic experience.  

I often remember a former student in a business class who hated writing yet was required (by me) to share her learning journey in that class to deepen her learning. She loved designing and making quilts. That was her happy place.  And we (the other students and I) ended up awed at her learning wall-panel quilt that showed a series of blocks that started with a blank square and then gradually more and more random shapes appeared in subsequent squares until eventually there was a complete and beautiful pattern in the final square.  It captured the learning process so well, and I gave her 100%.  She had reframed the problem the assignment gave her and used two of her strengths—design and quilting to complete it in an unusual way. 

How can you use your strengths to move from surviving the pandemic to thriving?

Check out our webinars and workshops to help you learn more about your strengths and how to use them well.