Q

Queue your Qualities

If I was to ask you to write down ten things you don’t like about yourself, I’d guess that you would be able to do it fairly easily. Some of you might struggle with the last one or two, but in general it would be easy enough to do. Now on the other hand if I were to ask

you to write down ten things you really like about yourself, chances are by the time you come to five you’ll be starting to struggle with your list. Don’t believe me, go do it, this isn’t going anywhere & the information might serve you better with that little exercise done beforehand.

We all have good qualities. For some people it is a really good sense of humour. They can see humour in most things & can lighten the mood in most situations. For others it is the ability to see both sides of the coin & an ability to reframe a situation so that all sides are clearly seen by all. Others go out of their way to be environmentally conscious, do their best to reduce their carbon footprint & encourage others to do so with hints & tips without ramming it down people’s throats. Some people always see the positives in any situation they find themselves in & do their best to pass it on to those around them. I could go on with a list of different types of qualities that all of us have, that we excel in more that one. Which do you have? Do you acknowledge it? Do others? How did you do on the exercise above? How do you use your qualities for the benefit of yourself & others?

I know I am good at being able to see both sides of a situation, am also good at being able to look at it impartially. So when someone asks my advice I can go through the pros & cons of the situation so that they can make an informed decision, I don’t tend to give advice as such anymore, but do list off the benefits & dis-advantages instead. I also go out of my way to make new people in my acquaintance feel welcome. As someone, who for years, waited to be invited

to join in rather that just do it, I can understand how daunting making that first step can be, so I go out of my way to make that first step for them, when I see it.

We are not just good at one thing. We are good at many, many different things. As life gets lived & we grow up it can be hard to see just how good we are at things. Of course we can list all the good employable qualities we have when we go job-hunting, we are taught to do that. Our everyday qualities don’t stop when we go to work, our work qualities don’t get hung on the coat hook when we come home. I remember a woman on a course over fifteen years ago saying she wasn’t good at anything & had come on that course to learn new skills. The facilitator asked her what she’d been doing for the previous ten to twenty years, it turned out she had been a stay at home full-time mother to three children, the youngest having just started secondary school, freeing up a lot of her day. The facilitator pointed out that as a full-time, stay at home mother she had had to develop the following skills; nurse, maid, cook, cleaner, negotiator, teacher, time-manager, budget planner, mender (clothes), house-keeper & companion. Her face when he listed them all off was a sight to see. Because so many people had written stay at home mothers off as less than useless she saw

herself that way, yet when she went into interviews with the new attitude to her qualities and skills she got offered the job straight away.

So do you do that to yourself? Negate all the good qualities you have and promote all the negative ones? Stop, look back on your list of bad qualities & ask yourself, when has there been a time when this bad quality has served a positive purpose for me? I can sometimes be quick to abandon things, usually this is a quality I see as negative. However, there was an occasion a few years ago when I quit something & discovered shortly afterwards something else I really wanted to do. Had I still been doing the first thing I would have missed an opportunity that I’m really glad now that I got. So even your negative qualities can have a positive purpose for you. Look at your list every day, see how you can use the best of your qualities to enhance the lives of those around you, also see how you can improve your negative qualities so that they too become positive qualities.