How Your Strength Can Sometimes Become Your Weakness

Great morning!

Switched up my routine a bit today…

I’m usually up around 5:30 and the first order of business, after coffee of course, is writing you something that will impact you in a positive way. Then I’ll spend 30 minutes on personal development.

Today I decided to spend an hour in personal development first.

I read something that really hit home for me.

It’s from an ancient Chinese Kung Fu proverb:

“A strength extended too far becomes a weakness.”

For some reason I imagine Yoda saying that.

Oh how true.

How Your Strengths Can Sometimes Become Your Weaknesses?

We love our strengths. We tend to want to show them off (whether we like to admit it or not). If our strength leads to some success, we tend to want to utilize that strength more and more.

I can remember when I finally… after many years of struggle… got good at sponsoring people.

I had read a bunch of books on sales and closing. And when I say a bunch I mean like 20 or 30.

I’ll admit that from time to time, I have an alter ego… we’ll call him “El Mateo”… that comes out and I get obsessively focused on a particular topic.

I got so good I started hosting my upline’s team wide prospecting calls. I’d close someone on pretty much every call and sometimes as many as 2 or 3 people on one call.

It was awesome.

The problem was, I focused all my energy there and I sucked at duplication.

After a few months, I had built a team of 150 people. The problem was, I had sponsored 90 of them and one other super-closer on my team had sponsored the rest.

Zero duplication and people were quitting as fast as we could bring them in.

I finally realized that by only focusing on my strength in closing, I had a poorly paid job in selling.

About a year later, we were doing live events in the Dallas area that were rocking…

I was crazy good at bringing people to events and I had figured out the duplication part…

but I would NEVER get on stage.

I realized that my strength in inviting people became a weakness because I didn’t have the skills to present in other cities where my groups started growing.

Reluctantly, I started presenting… and was terrible.

But I focused obsessively and got really good at presenting and closing from the stage.

So good that I became…

Da da da da ta da… Presentation Man!

The recognition was awesome and it felt great. It was cool because I could travel to other markets outside of Dallas and rock the stage, enroll people and motivate the team.

The problem was that I was using my strength in speaking so much that I stopped inviting people to events and my personal production went to near zero.

I could give you a bunch of different examples but here’s the takeaway…