Kenny Chapman argues that maximizing your strengths beats endlessly fixing weaknesses. He uses a Colorado hike story to show how focusing on what you're already good at drives better business results than chasing every gap.
Hey, everybody, Kenny Chapman here, the blue collar coach, coming to you live with this week's video version, Freedom Friday Focus. Now, this week, I want to talk to you about strengths and weaknesses. And I want to talk to you about improving your bottom line by maximizing your strengths. And I've got a simple, quick story.
I want to share with you.
Last Saturday, Christy and I went up to our Colorado National Monument, which is.
Right up here in the hills.
We live up by it.
And we went up and started this great hike. It was a beautiful Saturday morning. We got up early. We have a full sun in the desert mountains of Colorado.
We're hiking up. We see bighorn sheep, we see baby.
Fox running around, and it was just a glorious day. As we're coming up, well, as we.
Come around one bend, there's this lady coming down past us. And as I said, you know, good morning to her, we exchanged good mornings. I said, beautiful day, isn't it?
And she said, well, it'd be nice.
If we could get some cloud cup.
She just quips back at me as she continues down the trail.
And I stopped and I kind of.
Looked at Christy and I'm like, that.
Was a little odd. And everything I do, I kind of end up translating back to business. Now think about that for a minute. It couldn't be much more perfect out there. And yet she's wanting something she doesn't have. She's looking at what's wrong with the situation instead of finding what's right. In business planning, almost every process of business planning involves a SWOT analysis. If you're not familiar with that, the acronym stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The strengths. And you want to look at what the internal strengths and weaknesses are. That's all about inside the organization. Then you look outside the organization. What are the opportunities and what are the threats? Now, because the way we're wired, we have a tendency to spend all of our time working on improving our weaknesses. One of my mentors once said, if you spend your entire life improving weaknesses, you'll lie on your deathbed with a whole bunch of improved weaknesses. And I don't know about you, but that's not how I want to end my life. I want to maximize strengths. I want you to look at your company. What are you really good at? How can you build on that core? How can you take your own unique abilities within your organization and get better and better there? That's how you're going to improve your bottom line. I'm Kenny Chapman, the blue collar coach. Until we talk again.
Have a better than fantastic week and I'll see you next time.
