Know Thyself: Build Your Personal Brand Around Your Strengths

What if building a stronger personal brand isn’t about fixing your weaknesses, but understanding your strengths - then stretching them beyond what you thought possible?

Know thyself is ancient advice, but it remains one of the most useful principles for building a personal brand. The better you understand your strengths, the more intentionally and confidently you can build a career, reputation and body of work around them. But self-awareness also shouldn’t become a box. Your strengths are not a fixed identity. They're something you can discover, develop and evolve.

1. Play to Your Strengths 

When it comes to our own professional development or when leading others, it’s easy to defer to ‘overcoming weaknesses’. However, I once had a wonderful MBA professor in the topic of managing contemporary organisations who completely reframed our thinking on the idea. He advocated for spending less time overcoming weaknesses and more time playing to your strengths. 

As I’ve shared in my earlier blog, Getting to Your Zone of Genius: Where Your Personal Brand's Potential Begins, striving for your Zone of Genius requires pushing your comfort zone. But also ensure that your new zone still plays to your strengths. Don’t be so focused on working on your weaknesses that you lose sight of what your strengths are. 

As the animal school fable so cleverly communicated, don’t be like the duck, so stretched in learning to run that its increasingly unnaturally-webbed feet causes it to lose its strength in swimming.  

2. Discover Your Strengths 

It’s one thing to know that it’s worth playing to your strengths, but what if you don’t know what they are?

There are simply informal ways to discover your strengths: 

• Seek direct feedback from peers, colleagues or your social circles.

• Analyse your performance reviews for clues in your feedback.

• Reflect on how others describe you.

• Identify what you’re often the go-to person for.

• Keep a journal and explore patterns and themes around what you do well.

For a more structured approach to discovering your strengths, visit the VIA Institute on Character website, which offers a free Character Strengths Survey. It takes less than 15 minutes. With just the free option, it can increase your understanding of your strongest qualities. Based on your results, you’ll see how 24 different strengths rank for you. And most importantly, what tops the list. These strenghts give you clues into the personal brand you project to others.

As VIA highlights, applying your strengths helps increase your:

• Confidence

• Happiness

• Relationships

• Work performance

It helps you manage problems and reduce stress. It also helps you achieve your goals and build meaning and purpose. 

VIA states:

“Workers who use four or more of their signature strengths at work have more positive work experiences and report their work is a calling in their life.”

So, if you want to build a personal brand doing work you love and creating a legacy you’re proud of, play to your strengths.

3. Beyond the Labels. The Identity Traps 

While knowing your strengths can be a constructive starting point, don’t become attached to these labels. One of my favourite parts of the VIA Institute on Character profiles is that every time I’ve taken the test, my strengths evolve slightly as I do - as my experiences and goals shift.

As I explored in my earlier blog, The Other Side of You: Beyond The Labels. Expanding Your Personal Brand, from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to the Enneagram and more, there’s a reason why popular personality tests feel so compelling. They give language to something intangible. They are a quick win for perceived clarity.

Personality tests are often fun to complete for team building and help you feel seen. But this instant clarity can become your confinement.  What most miss is that most personality frameworks were never designed to be definitive. Traits exist on spectrums. They shift with context, environment and experience. They are also self-assessments. The danger of personality tests isn’t taking the test itself, but the moment you stop questioning them or seeing them as a label. At this point, you let “self-awareness” quietly become self-limiting. 

In the book, Personality isn’t Permanent, Organisation Psychologist Benjamin Hardy, PhD, makes a strong case against personality tests: 

“You are not a single and narrow “type” of person. In different situations and around different people, you are different. Your personality is dynamic, flexible, and contextual. Moreover, your personality changes throughout your life, far more than you can presently imagine.”

He instead says that psychological flexibility is the key to personal transformation. Not over-identifying with your current identity or perspectives. 

Develop your skills through effort, learning and persistence, instead of being defined by natural-born talents or perceived shortcomings. 

4. Don’t Confuse Strengths with Natural-Born Talent

As I shared in my earlier blog, The Power of ‘Painful Practice’ for Your Personal Brand, your greatest strengths aren’t always your natural-born talent. Again, this isn’t about overcoming weaknesses and diverting your focus entirely to those things. But instead, it’s about elevating what you’re already naturally inclined towards further. Pursuing the things that feel inherently meaningful to you rather than trying to improve a weakness.

For example in the book, The Art of Work, Jeff Goins calls for “painful practice”. Because it is work after all. A far cry from the popular rhetoric that when you find what you love, you don’t have to work a day in your life. Goins reminds us that practising new skills is meant to be challenging. 

During a workout, you stress and strain your muscles to create expansion. Mastering strengths for your personal brand can be similar. If you’re truly challenging yourself, it should still feel uncomfortable. How could you aim to be 1% better every time you practise, even in your strengths?

Goins says: 

“Researchers have argued that what we used to think of as natural talent is, in fact, the result of good old-fashioned practice.”

Know Thyself. Then Keep Going.

Knowing yourself isn’t about finding a fixed definition of who you are. It’s about recognising what makes you effective, meaningful and uniquely you — then deliberately developing it. Play to your strengths, challenge them through practice, and leave room for them to evolve.