One of the components of successful Goal Setting and Planning is to help identify your personal strengths and weaknesses. In the Mastering Business Development® Workshop, we use this exercise to identify weaknesses and put together action plans to offset those shortcomings. Few of us realize that sometimes our strengths can lead to weakness, too. In the case where a strength taken to an extreme becomes a weakness, we could become too focused, too committed, too articulate or too polished in our Business Development process.

John Wooden, the legendary UCLA basketball coach, provides us a good example of this concept with competitiveness. In his experience, he saw that being too competitive caused an individual to lose self-control and become tight emotionally, mentally, and physically, i.e. non-productive. Instead of being too competitive and overly worried about the final score, he constantly urged his players, "to strive for the self-satisfaction that always comes from knowing you did the best you could to become the best of which you are capable." For us this means putting your efforts into developing yourself across the board. Concentrate on those areas you identify need attention and quit relying exclusively upon your well developed, and perhaps, overly used strong points.

Any strength you take to an extreme will become your weakness. Through your own goal setting,  planning and self help process, discover what you are really good at, and then ask yourself if you unknowingly overplay that strong point to the detriment of everything else.

If you focus only on your strengths, you may be short-changing

the areas that you really need to focus upon to better yourself.