Counseling to help our patients work on their strengths and manage their weaknesses

In counseling, we often help our patients to see their strengths/superpower and embrace that. We also help them to see their weaknesses that inherently come with that “superpower”, and accept that too.

For example, if you have the special ability to make decisions based on your own internal principles, feelings, and values, your inherent blindspot will be the tendency to break social norms.

If you have the special ability of being highly aware and making decisions based on the feelings, values and rules of others, you can obviously follow social norms with ease. However, your inherent blindspot may be, not knowing your own values, principles, and if excessive, not even knowing “who you are”. This may lead to inner disharmony and unhappiness. 

If we are not careful, we let others judge us based on our weaknesses, and worse still, judge ourselves based on our weaknesses.  As someone famous did say, you can’t judge a fish by how high they can climb a tree. 

Part of counseling is to shift that thinking towards working on our strengths, as we get a better return on investments on that, AND at the same time, manage our weaknesses, but with awareness and acceptance. 

This is very important when assisting kids with special needs too.

Do you know your strengths and weaknesses?