Being able to access your personality strengths as you navigate life can provide you the awareness needed to live a life you love. Personality strengths can anchor you to your best, most aware self. This part of you is ready to conquer the challenges of life. This part of you is full of energy and vitality. So how can psychotherapy, counseling or coaching help you utilize your personality strengths in everyday life? Here are a few ways that therapy could possibly help you grow your connection with your strengths.
Awareness of Strengths
Therapy can help you become aware of your unique strengths. Unfortunately, discovering your strengths is not as involuntary as breathing. This process requires a deepening of your awareness. Therapy can be an experience in which you are able to clarify your identity and strengths. Maybe you learned early on in life that perfectionism was the way to earn love. As we all know perfectionism is a difficult guide to follow. Processing your perfectionism may lead to identifying a healthier strength such as a “commitment to excellence.” Perfectionism is like chasing the horizon, you will never reach it. Excellence allows you to pursue your goals with the best of who you are minus the unrealistic demands of perfectionism.
Brainstorm
Once you understand your strengths, therapy can help you brainstorm potential uses for your strengths. You may find great benefit from brainstorm new ways for your strengths that you never thought possible. The brain is powerful muscle, but it can easily default to certain thinking patterns that do not allow for new strengths. Therapy may be a great experience to challenge your brain to find new solutions to your challenges.
Practice Using Strengths
Therapy sessions can be a place for you to practice using your strengths. You can take real life situations and replay them using your strengths. Maybe you encountered a stressful conversation with someone in which you didn’t access your strengths as well as you would have liked. Therapy can be the place to reframe and redo the situation using your strengths. This can help wire in new neural pathways in your brain so that next time you find yourself in this situation your strengths are more accessible.
