Assess Your Strengths, before You Start Your Own Career Plan

Ask a trainer what he or she is good at and you’ll hear something like this: “I’m pretty good at A but I really need to work on B, C, D, E, F….” Perhaps we spend so much time investigating other people’s performance problems and patching up weaknesses in the classroom that we’re unable to look objectively at our personal and professional assets.

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But a rational career planning and development effort is based on understanding and exploiting one’s strengths, not on bolstering one’s perceived weaknesses. To do otherwise is to fall victim to a reasoning/thinking fallacy that psychiatrist Albert Ellis refers to as the Musterbation of Perfection: “I must be perfect. After all, I’m a trainer and trainers are infallible.” Continue reading