Improving your Career in 2023: How to Identify, Embrace and Overcome Your Weaknesses

Do your goals for 2023 include improving your career? If that’s the case, there’s one thing you need to understand. Identifying, embracing, and overcoming your weaknesses will be the most helpful thing you can do to reach your professional goals.

But the truth is, addressing — and even more, tackling — shortcomings and deficiencies isn’t the most enjoyable experience. It requires determination, dedication, and preparedness to do things way outside your comfort zone. Nonetheless, it’s a journey that ends in plentiful bounties and is worth taking.

So, if you’re genuinely interested in applying yourself to practices that will positively impact your career in 2023, this might be the year to start working on your weaknesses.

The Importance of Continuously Investing in Self-Improvement

If you regularly read career advice blogs, you’ll have heard one particular phrase multiple times. It’s essential to invest in your professional and personal growth.

But have you ever thought about the why behind the concept of self-improvement? If you consult the research on lifelong learning, you’ll find out why developing strengths and overcoming weaknesses is beneficial.

According to a research paper published in 2012, the benefits of lifelong learning include:

• A higher chance to lead an enriching life and feel self-fulfilment.
• The opportunity to forge new connections and relationships.
• Being an active contributor to society.
• The ability to find meaning in our lives.
• Heightened adaptability capabilities.
• Unlocking new perspectives and improving empathy.
• The opportunity to develop innate capabilities to their maximum.

It’s also worth mentioning that adopting a growth mindset could help you financially by helping you address the weaknesses holding you back from your dream job, a coveted promotion, or simply getting more done with fewer resources.

Additionally, there’s another tremendous benefit of addressing your shortcomings: learning to exit your comfort zone.

No matter what your goal is, exiting your comfort zone is only going to bring advantages. Of course, when we refer to leaving your comfort zone, we do not mean pushing yourself harder than you can handle (which will inevitably lead to burnout or trauma).

By encouraging you to push yourself, we want to empower you to enter a development space where you can expose yourself to some mild challenges. These challenges will help you develop existing or adopt and build new skills.

But how do you identify, embrace, and overcome your weaknesses to advance your career? Well, it takes a step-by-step approach.

Identifying Opportunities to Grow

The first thing you have to do when deciding to overcome your weaknesses is to identify your growth opportunities.

For some people, this will be easy. They already know what they want to achieve and have a list of hard or soft skills crucial for getting them to their destination.

Thanks to such a list, they can work through these growth opportunities. They can develop each of these abilities alone. They can do so with the help of widely-available online tools. Or if they have highly-specific goals — like getting into a particular MBA program — they can

However, for some people, identifying growth opportunities isn’t as easy.

Not only do some individuals feel lost when they have to set self-improvement goals, but for many people, identifying weaknesses seems terrifying. It feels akin to admitting that their shortcomings define who they are and limit who they can become.

For these people, the essential step will be to accept that everyone has something they could improve. It doesn’t matter whether that’s a soft skill — like learning how to network or time-block — or a more defined ability, like the ability to code or speak a foreign language.

What counts is that the inability to do something (or do it well) isn’t a limiting factor. More often, it’s an opportunity to grow, improve, and eventually reap the benefits of having invested energy and effort into an area of self-improvement.

How to Overcome Your Weaknesses

Once you’ve identified your growth opportunities (and accepted that having those opportunities is a positive thing), it’s time to start working on overcoming your weaknesses.

Generally, there are four steps you will have to go through:

1. Accept that you can’t be good at everything.

Although it’d be great if people could be masters of all trades, the truth is that all of us have some shortcomings. And though we may not have the innate capabilities to master specific skills — like you probably won’t become a world-class musician if you’re absolutely tone-deaf — we can and should still apply ourselves to developing new abilities. So, although being tone-deaf means we won’t have a career in music, that doesn’t mean that learning to play an instrument won’t provide us with benefits like boosting memory capacity, improving fine-motor skills, or widening our horizons via the medium of music.

2. Create a plan.

The second step towards overcoming your weaknesses is to have a well-defined action plan. Know what you want to achieve and outline the steps to get to your ultimate goal.

Generally, the best way to accomplish your objectives is to learn how to This will give you an aim to work towards. Moreover, it will provide guidelines like KPIs to help you measure your progress and a time frame that will provide some form of external motivation to continue working when your motivation levels naturally dip.

3. Seek help.

Most of us can’t do everything on our own. And although it may seem just a little bit less daunting to address your weaknesses by yourself, understand that guidance will make your progress notably faster and easier. For this reason, encourage yourself to seek mentors when you start your journey toward self-improvement.

You can also explore online resources (which are often free), and talk to your friends and acquaintances who are good at the things you’re trying to improve. Chances are, they’ll be more than happy to help or, at least, point you in the right direction to getting started.

4. Celebrate your wins.

Finally, as you progress through your journey of developing skills you never thought you could master, it’s essential that you take the time to celebrate your wins. Even when they’re small.

This will provide you with a bit of a dopamine boost that will encourage you to continue working towards your goals. Moreover, it will also unlock a feeling of accomplishment and teach you to appreciate and value your hard work. And that is essential if you’re trying to unlock abilities that will allow you to move your career forward in 2023.

Final Thoughts

Admitting our weaknesses is never easy. But if you’re brave enough to do it, you’ll be on your way to unlocking your full potential.

So, if you’re looking for opportunities to grow in the upcoming year, perhaps now’s the best time to identify, accept, and overcome your weaknesses. Sure, it won’t be an easy process. But at the end of the day, it will be more than worth the hard work.

Cover photo courtesy of Unsplash