11 Questions That Reveal Your Unique Strengths

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We all have an unconventional side, whether we see it or not. The world is full of all kinds of minds.

A better understanding of your unconventional strengths can help you:

• Notice and appreciate your uniqueness.
• Experience deep insights about potential ways you can thrive that align with your natural tendencies.
• Challenge assumptions about what success, intelligence, or competence should look like.
• Make sense of your personal experiences with being different, misunderstood, or nontraditional.
• Reframe your differences as advantages rather than shortcomings, especially in moments when you feel vulnerable.

Here, we'll explore 11 questions to help you experience these benefits.

Questions to Uncover Your Unconventional Strengths

1. What rules or norms have you never felt the need to follow?
2. What’s something you never do the “right” way, but it still works?
3. What confuses others that seems obvious to you?
4. What’s a “bad habit” of yours that actually makes your life easier?
5. What’s a tool or method you use completely differently from how it was intended?
6. What’s something you don’t stress about that everyone else seems to?
7. What’s an expectation you’ve just never understood the point of?
8. What’s a system or structure you’ve reinvented just because the normal way didn’t make sense to you?
9. What’s something you think is totally unnecessary that most people take seriously?
10. What’s a life rule you quietly ignore, and it’s never caused a problem?
11. What’s a weird shortcut you swear by?

How to Get the Most Out of These Questions

1. Try answering all the questions, even if you can't do it all at once. Intentionally, there is some repetition in the themes of the questions. This is because slightly different wording is likely to spark different responses from you.
2. Answer the questions again a few days from now. Your brain will naturally think of new answers in the background, even if you're not aware of it.
3. When you answer the questions again, do it when you're in a different mood from the first time. If you answered them when you felt fresh and happy, try again when you're tired or sad, or vice versa. Our tired or sad brain sometimes thinks more freely.
4. Consider different domains when answering e.g, your personal vs. professional life.
5. If you're stuck for ideas, ask someone who knows you well!

Being unconventional isn’t always easy. It can mean feeling misunderstood, out of place, and unsure how you can succeed in a world that values conformity. The questions in this article have been designed to help you recognize that even if you don’t fit the typical stereotype of a productive person, you may already be succeeding in ways you don't fully realize. The more deeply you understand your unconventional strengths, the less anxious you'll feel about not doing things the way most other people do them. You'll be able to more easily see paths to success that feel authentic to who you are.

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