# Examples of Strengths and Weaknesses of a Person, and How to Spot Your Own Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals/example-of-strength-and-weaknesses-of-a-person/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals/example-of-strength-and-weaknesses-of-a-person.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving building self-awareness at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Common examples of strengths and weaknesses in a person, why the same trait can be both, and how to work out which ones are actually yours. ## Key facts - Title: Examples of Strengths and Weaknesses of a Person, and How to Spot Your Own - Category: Setting Goals - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Setting Goals, Building Confidence - Primary keyword: example of strength and weaknesses of a person - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals/example-of-strength-and-weaknesses-of-a-person/ ## What this page covers - Common examples of strengths and weaknesses in a person, why the same trait can be both, and how to work out which ones are actually yours. - Practical guidance for example of strength and weaknesses of a person - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation Common examples of strengths in a person include reliability, honesty, patience, curiosity, and staying calm under pressure. Common examples of weaknesses include impatience, [perfectionism](/knowledge/self-awareness/perfectionism/), disorganization, [difficulty saying no](/knowledge/time-management/how-to-say-no-at-work/), and avoiding conflict. The most useful thing to notice about any list of examples of strength and weaknesses of a person, though, is that the two halves overlap — the same underlying trait tends to show up as a strength in one situation and a weakness in another. Which is why scrolling a long list rarely settles anything. You can nod at half of it and still have no clear idea which entries are actually yours. ## What counts as a strength, and what counts as a weakness? A strength is something you do well with less effort than it costs other people. Guides like High5's personal strengths list split them three ways: character traits such as being sociable or open-minded, high-value skills you deliberately built, and natural talents you never had to work at. A weakness is the mirror image — an area where you are less naturally equipped, so the same result costs you more effort, more attention, or more discomfort. That framing matters because it takes the moral charge out of the word. A weakness is not a character flaw or a verdict on you as a person. It is a statement about where your effort buys less than it does elsewhere, which is a practical fact you can plan around rather than something to be ashamed of. ## What are common examples of strengths in a person? The lists are long — High5 publishes around 90 personal strengths, and Inside Out Mastery runs to more than 200 — but the same entries recur. On the character side: honesty, patience, empathy, resilience, curiosity, reliability, generosity, optimism, and a willingness to admit when you're wrong. On the work-facing side, Coursera's interview guide names adaptability, problem-solving, teamwork, attention to detail, and strong communication as the five most commonly offered. A useful filter for all of these: a real strength usually does two things at once. You are good at it *and* it leaves you with energy rather than draining you. The things you are merely competent at — reliably fine, quietly exhausting — belong in a different column. ## What are common examples of weaknesses in a person? Coursera's list of the weaknesses people most often name covers perfectionism, difficulty delegating, impatience, [nervousness speaking in public](/knowledge/confidence/overcome-fear-of-public-speaking/), and a tendency to overcommit. Indeed's guidance adds another that shows up constantly and is rarely admitted: difficulty estimating how long work will actually take. Beyond those, the recurring ones across the personal-development lists are disorganization, being overly self-critical, shyness in groups, conflict avoidance, stubbornness, and taking things personally. Note how ordinary that catalogue is. Almost nobody's weaknesses are exotic — which is worth remembering if you have been treating yours as uniquely disqualifying. ## Can the same trait be both a strength and a weakness? Yes, and this is the single most useful idea in the whole topic. Weaknesses are very often a strength overused or applied in the wrong setting. StrengthsTest puts it plainly: decisiveness becomes impatience, thoroughness becomes perfectionism. High5 makes the same point from the other direction — if you are organized and structured, last-minute changes will be harder for you than for someone who isn't. The writer Nathan Bransford's character list captures it in the same shape: brave shades into reckless, idealistic shades into naive. So the honest version of the question is not "which traits do I have?" It's "where does each of my traits help me, and where does the same trait start costing me?" One trait, two contexts, two outcomes. ## How do I work out which strengths and weaknesses are mine? Not by introspection alone, because your own read on yourself is the least reliable one available. Three sources of evidence work better together than any of them alone. First, your own record: look back over the last six months and write down what genuinely went well and what went badly, then read both lists for patterns. A single missed deadline is noise; a pattern of underestimating time is a signal. Second, other people: ask two or three colleagues who will be straight with you what they think you're good at and where you get in your own way — the surprises are the point. Third, energy: mark which tasks left you charged and which left you flat. A personal SWOT analysis is the standard way to lay this out, and assessment templates from sources like Carepatron and 123test exist for exactly this. If the blank page is the problem, it can also help to [see which strengths show up](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) when someone else does the scoring, then compare that against the list you'd have written yourself. ## How many strengths and weaknesses should I be able to name? For general self-knowledge, three to five solid strengths is the usual recommendation — enough range to be useful, few enough that each one means something. Bright Network suggests preparing at least three weaknesses, deliberately mixed: one a personal quality such as impatience, one a practical skill gap such as software you still need to learn. In an interview, less is more. Unless you're asked for several, one strength and one weakness, each backed by a specific example, is a stronger answer than a list. The number was never the test. Being able to say *here is when that showed up and here is what happened* is what actually demonstrates you know yourself. ## Which weaknesses are safe to admit at work or in an interview? Recruiters ask the question, as Naukri's career guidance notes, mainly to gauge self-awareness and honesty — not to catch you out. That reframes what "safe" means. A weakness is safe when it is real, specific, not central to the job you're applying for, and paired with what you're actually doing about it. What is not safe is the polished non-answer. "I'm a perfectionist" has been recommended for so long that it now reads as evasion, and interviewers hear it several times a week. Also avoid naming something the role depends on outright. Everything else is fair game, and the specificity is what makes it land. ## Should I fix my weaknesses or build on my strengths? Mostly build on strengths and manage around weaknesses. As IQ Matrix puts it, strong people don't focus on their weaknesses — they are self-aware enough to strategize around them. Bring a weakness up to "good enough" only when it actively blocks you, or work around it by partnering with someone who covers it. This is the part that trips up people fresh out of education, because school grades you on every subject and rewards patching your worst one. Work doesn't. You get to choose which things you become excellent at, and the ones that don't matter for [where you're headed](/knowledge/setting-goals/how-to-set-career-goals/) can simply stay mediocre. ## The skills that turn a list into a real answer Read back across those answers and a pattern shows through: almost none of it was about knowing more adjectives. It was about gathering evidence, hearing what other people see, and deciding what to do with the result — and each of those is a habit you can build. **Building Self-Awareness** is the engine of the whole exercise. It's the ongoing work of identifying what you're genuinely good at rather than merely competent at, spotting the biases and blind spots that quietly distort your self-image, and using feedback to see the parts you can't reach from the inside. What it isn't is a personality quiz result you carry around for life — the skill is keeping the picture honest as new evidence arrives, not fixing it in place. **Setting Goals** is what makes the answer worth having in the first place. An accurate read on yourself only pays off if you steer by it: aiming at roles and tasks that sit in your strengths zone, and letting go of weaknesses that are irrelevant to where you're going. That direction has to come from you rather than from what someone else thinks you should be good at, which is precisely why borrowing another person's list of strengths gets you nowhere. **Building Confidence** is what makes the weakness column survivable. Most of what looks like a fixed weakness is a skill you haven't practiced yet — broken into small enough steps and repeated, it moves. And when something goes wrong, three questions keep it in proportion: is this always the case or not always, everything or not everything, me or not me. That's what stops one bad month from being written down as a permanent trait. If you'd rather not guess at any of this, the Job Skills Test scores you across twelve work skills — the three above among them — and gives you [a scored read on yourself](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) instead of an estimate. It's free, and nothing it measures is treated as fixed. Some of this has probably already sounded like you. You may have caught yourself mid-list thinking *that one's mine* about two or three of the examples, and hesitating over the rest. The hesitation is the honest position, and it's a far better place to start from than a confident list assembled to sound good in a room. None of it is settled, either — the weaknesses you can name are the ones you can do something about, and you can work on any of them while still being entirely yourself. The gap between how you see yourself and how your work actually goes gets more expensive the further you go, which is a good argument for closing it now, while it takes an afternoon rather than a reckoning. You've already done the part most people skip, which is looking squarely at the unflattering half. ## Find out where yours actually stand So the only thing left is to stop estimating. The **free** Job Skills Test is a short self-assessment of your work skills: you answer a set of questions and it shows you where you stand across all twelve — which are genuinely strengths of yours, and which are the ones worth putting effort into next. Your results appear straight away, so you can hold them up against the list you would have written for yourself and see where the two disagree. **[Discover my skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, and it takes about 7 minutes.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Common examples of strengths and weaknesses in a person, why the same trait can be both, and how to work out which ones are actually yours. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Building Self-Awareness. It also relates to Setting Goals, Building Confidence. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/confidence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals/example-of-strength-and-weaknesses-of-a-person/ Preferred summary: "Common examples of strengths and weaknesses in a person, why the same trait can be both, and how to work out which ones are actually yours." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.