We all have many strengths, such as those we have spent some effort developing. We call these strengths our self-built strengths.  They include such strengths as skills, achievements, training, education, knowledge, personalities to meet various circumstances, and numerous learned behaviors. Core strengths are different and core strengths, of course, are where we should focus our attention. Don’t spend your life primarily building your self-made strengths because they are not your essential core strengths.

What are core strengths?

So what are our core strengths? Most people have no idea.  And the words “core strengths” have little meaning or definition. Yet our core strengths (what I also call our dominant strengths) are what we should be most interested in because these are the ones that are shaping our lives.  And they are, in fact, what play the major roles in the urges and drives that shape our temperament. Just as the core muscles of our body need our attention if we want to be strong and athletic, we have core strengths that describe us best and shape the design of who we are. A person with extensive knowledge or skills can fail miserably at becoming an amazing person when their core strengths are not developed. It’s our core strengths that make us the amazing person we are designed to be.  Or they distort us when they are misused.

How do we find our core strengths?

To get to our dominant strengths that shape who we are, we will need the help of the InnerKinetics Temperament Key.  [If you haven’t completed one please take the Temperament Key now.  It will reveal, first, your temperament.  And then you will learn which are the strengths that make up your temperament. This is the way different temperaments were originally identified.]

Discover your InnerKinetics

You, not someone else, will be the identifier of your temperament. Two of the letters (letters are used as just symbols) from the resulting four-letters identified by the Temperament Key will lead you to your temperament. Find your temperament’s symbols by identifying which pair of letters are both found in the four letters of your temperament key’s results:  SP, SJ, NT, or NF.  (Example: if your result was ESTP, both the S and P occur, so this is the SP temperament).

Can core strengths become weaknesses?

Let’s recall an important piece of information: Each core strength can become either a strength or a weaknesses depending on how we use it. The three ways we can use strengths are:

• Misused  — using them to do damage, intentionally or not, to others or ourselves.
• Overused — used to the point of damaging others or ourselves (others can include God).
• Not used at all.

Such distortions of a temperament’s strengths turn the strength into a weakness. So, do you distort your strengths by using all or some of them in one of these three ways? If so, they have become, in their distorted form, a weakness. Therefore, don’t make the mistake of seeking to improve yourself by focusing on correcting your weaknesses. The absence of a weakness does not make us stronger. Only the building of our strengths makes us stronger and better.

Why is this true? If a weakness is a distortion of a strength, then it makes sense to focus on building our strengths if we want to be stronger.

The correct use of your strengths is defined as:

• Using them — when not used they become a weakness.
• Using them to benefit yourself (but not to also hurt others).
• Using them to benefit others (others includes God)

The lists of dominant strengths for each temperament will tell us our core strengths. They are the urges and drives that are central to how we think, feel, and act.  They are the building blocks of our unique makeup, our inner design.

Remember this phrase:  “A temperament’s strengths are the urges and drives that shape us and our lives.”

Here is the lists of each temperament’s strengths. Memorize the strengths of your temperament.