Focusing on Your Strengths, Not Weaknesses, to Enhance Performance

Hi, this is Blair Singer, best selling author of Little Voice Mastery and also Sales dogs and the ABCs of how to build a business team that wins. You know, throughout Most of my 28, 29 years in this business and working on myself in business, it's always the intriguing holy grails. How do you get the best performance out of others? But most importantly, how do I get the best performance out of myself? I used to think that when I used to have a job many years ago, you do all these performance reviews and analysis and they tell you your strengths and your weaknesses. And then they tell you that if you want to be better, you got to work on your weaknesses. And that was always what I did. Okay, I need to work on this, I need to work on that. And truthfully, we have some weaknesses like procrastination or being lazy or putting things off. But you know, it's a little deeper than that. The truth of it is, is that what I found most recently over the last 10 years is that if you want to focus on your weaknesses, guess what, you're going to find a lot of them. As a matter of fact, after you find one weakness, guess what you're going to find is another one. And what happens is you can dig a hole so deep, looking for every deep, dark, secret, malady, inconsistency about you, and you'll never be dissatisfied with looking for one because you'll always find one. And that's a problem. What my great teacher Alan Walter taught me is he said if you focus on what works, all the negative will ultimately begin to fall away. The reason I say that, the reason I wrote Sales Dogs, the reason I wrote the Little Voice Mastery book, is because if you want to get the best performance out of yourself, find focus on your strength. How many of you realize that it's difficult to try to be somebody that you're not? It's hard enough to figure out who you are and what you're supposed to be. But I know that the closer I get to doing that, the more fun I have in my life, the more money seems to roll in, the greater resources I have, the better friends I have, the better health I have. I mean, those are all pretty good things. Focusing on your strengths, not on your weaknesses. Now I'm going to make a distinction. There's a difference between weaknesses and bad habits. Bad habits you need to change. A weakness would be like, let's say I want to play basketball in the NBA. Well, if I stood up, you'd see I'm only 5 foot 8. I'm in my 50s. My vertical jump is maybe 12 inches at best. There's no flipping way I'm going to be able to be a pro in the National Basketball Association. That's a weakness. I'm vertically impaired, so to speak. But the truth of it is. So the truth of it is you can't be whoever you want to be. You got to be who you're supposed to be. And you know what? If you find out who that is and the closer you get to it, like Bucky Fuller said, you may never find out what you're supposed to be doing, but the closer you get to it, the more you'll be serving other people. You know another great teacher I have had lately, a fellow you hear me talk about a lot, Mac Newton. If you go to MacNewton.com he's an 8th degree black belt taekwondo. He's a conditioning coach to the stars in pro sports. I think he's the only person besides Deion Sanders that has both a Super bowl ring and a World Series ring. In chapter eight of my book, Little Voice Mastery, he talks about something called your self concept. Your self concept drives everything to your results. And he says that your results can never exceed your self concept. Now why is this important? Because part of your self concept is your self esteem, your self image, your self ideals. See? And if you have a negative image, if you're looking at what's wrong with you, if you're looking at the things that don't work about you, your self image is going to be negative. And what he says, after coaching thousands of the greatest athletes in the world, is your results. I'll say it again, your results can never exceed your self concept. So if you're focusing on the negative, your results are always going to be suspect. But if you're focusing on what you're good at, I like myself. I can do this. I've been preparing all my life for this. I like who I am. I'm getting better. Then in fact, your results will jump exponentially. You know when we did this in our sales training, in some of the same sales trainings we have been doing for years and focused on self concept, getting people to focus on their strengths and igniting that as opposed to just finding out what's wrong with them and trying to fix that, sales jumped over 50%. Ask yourself, would you like a 50% increase in your income? Would you like a 50% increase in YOUR health? Would you like at least a 10% increase in the harmony and the peace of mind in your life. Well then what I'm here to tell you is there's only one thought. I have another great friend who's a Buddhist monk. He said there's only one thought that holds all that doubt and all that negativity in place. You know what that thought is? The thought is that there's something wrong with you. If you can eliminate that thought or program or reaffirm. Over top of that, the floodgates of money resource love all come flowing to you. Why? Because there's only one thing. There's only one part of you that thinks there's something wrong. There's nothing wrong with you. You're golden, you're awesome. But for most of our lives, in school, wherever we've gone, what's wrong with you and fix it. What's wrong with you and fix it. Look, there's plenty to fix. But like Alan says, if you focus on what works, if you focus on that piece of you that's good. Override the little voice says there's something wrong with you, your self concept gets bigger, your self esteem gets bigger and your results improve. We all have weaknesses, but focus on the strengths, work on those with reckless abandon if you have to and the negatives will fall away.