Do you tend to focus on your weaknesses or your strengths?
Have you ever considered that your greatest weakness might be your greatest strength?
Think for a moment about a weakness you consider yourself to have. What might be a corresponding strength?
Here’s what I mean… weaknesses and strengths are part of the same continuum. How they manifest in your life has a lot to do with your perspective.
The wrong outlook propels you toward disaster.
A positive perspective equips you to succeed.
So when my daughter, at five and six years of age, put up a stink every time I asked her to do something, I could have called her uncooperative or stubborn or any other number of not-so-positive attributes. Instead, I admired her ability to negotiate and her courage to express her opinion. More than once, through gritted teeth, I told her that she’d make a good lawyer one day.
For my own sanity, probably more than for her mental health, I was looking for the positives.
Can you relate?
If you’re a “creative” type, you may have been criticized by your parents and teachers as being a dreamer or lazy.
Yet, that ability to shut out the world around you and let your imagination run wild is an essential quality for a writer.
Or perhaps you’re criticized for being too obstinate as the heroine in my current wip is. But what is obstinancy?
It’s firmly adhering to one’s purpose or opinion. Not yielding. Not giving up.
Are you seeing the strengths in that definition?
I am. My heroine is determined and persistent and she won’t give up, and because of it, she’ll ultimately win the day, but along the way, her unyielding nature is bound to stir up trouble.
We tend to respond to fiction when it resonates with us. When we recognize ourselves in the characters or in their experiences or in their dreams or in their circumstances.
If, unlike the villains I talked about on Monday, the hero rises above a tragic experience, if she triumphs over impossible odds, we are filled with hope that we could triumph, too.
Your Turn: What’s a weakness you feel that you have and the corresponding strength? If you can’t think of what the corresponding strength would be, we’ll help!!
Praying you see yourself in a new positive light today!
Image courtesy of Andy Newson / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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