At the place I work at, we have a yearly one-on-one dialogue with our manager. There we talk about what we did the past year, what we want to focus on in the upcoming year and we also give each other feedback. Although this is only mandatory for employees and not working students, my manager also wanted to talk to all students, because we are just as much part of the gang as the rest 😎
Today, I had this dialogue with my manager and I was greatly praised by him. He remarked how I work independently, how I take the initiative when it comes to automating and improving current workflows if I realize there is some efficiency to gain, and how the results I produce are always well thought out and reliable. Yes, I went out of that meeting room with a big fucking smile 😁
Anyway, in that moment I realized something: What I perceive as my weaknesses, others perceive as my strengths; though most of the time it is just a matter of how you phrase the particular trait. For instance, for the longest time I didn’t really thought of myself as being independent, but rather as being too incompetent to ask for help; instead of being reliable and being someone who produces very thought out results, I always saw myself as being a perfectionist, who doesn’t get anything done.
My point is, the things that I thought are holding me back actually got me to where I am today and I should embrace them more. I’m not saying that the above mentioned negative traits are incorrect, but rather they co-exist with the postive traits that my manager mentioned. I am too incompetent to ask for help and I am an independent worker. I am a perfectionist barely getting anything out there and I am reliable as fuck and thinking everything through before putting it out.
I think that realizing your strengths and weaknesses often go hand in hand: your traits, whatever they are, always have a positive and a negative side. It is your responsibility to figure out what these traits are and what these positives and negatives are, because from there you only need to give the negative side a little nudge and the trait suddenly becomes exceedingly postive. Or don’t change anything, knowing something about yourself alone makes a huge difference in your life 😊
Ash