Your SUPERPOWER Is Also Your Most Deadly BLIND SPOT

Common wisdom says to lean into your strengths. But as a psychologist and leadership coach, I've seen how often that becomes a problem-and how to fix it.

- by MARTIN DUBIN

For successful people, there's nothing more confusing than failing when you gave it your best. You leaned on your tried-and-true personality traits-the ones everyone agrees are your "superstrengths"and yet, things fell apart. Fortunately, when this happens, there's a fairly common diagnosis: You have encountered a blind spot.

As a clinical psychologist turned business coach, I've spent years honing my intuition to recognize when previously successful leaders, executives, or entrepreneurs were getting in their own way, and to come up with tailored solutions to help them. What I've learned is that we are not as self-aware as we believe.

We tend to feel as if most of our traits, instincts, and feelings are like everyone else's-except for where we see ourselves as exceptional or gifted, in ways that we imagine can only serve as a positive. And when I began as a coach and started to hear people talk about the strengths and weaknesses of the people they work with, I took their answers at face value. If an executive was praised for their confidence, I'd make a note of it, and look for other areas that might need to be worked on instead. After all, strengths are good, I reasoned. It's the weaknesses that we need to worry about.

But after a little while, I started to notice a surprising pattern.