When Your Personality Strengths Become Your Blindspots
Ultimately, our strengths and blindspots are two sides of the same coin…
We all love the idea of strengths. Strengths help us stand out, define our approach to life, and often drive our success. These dominant behavioural patterns—whether it's meticulous planning, unwavering flexibility, or boundless optimism—are at the heart of our personality.
But there’s a catch.
The very strengths that propel us forward can also become our biggest blindspots.
Unchecked, these blindspots can limit our growth, strain relationships, make teamwork a drag, and reduce our adaptability in diverse situations. Think of it as only using a hammer to solve every building problem.
Understanding this dual nature matters deeply because it empowers us to harness our strengths consciously, rather than being unconsciously controlled by them—ultimately helping us build richer, more balanced lives.
Let’s explore…
At TALY, we make it easy to explore your strengths, and to be mindful of your blindspots. The AskTALY AI brings your personality to life in a simple and interactive way, helping you build self-awareness – and ultimately building engaged, high performing teams.
Curious to learn more? Let’s chat about how TALY’s tools can help you navigate the complexities of workplace conflict. Get in touch or book a demo today
How can our strength be our blindspots?
Well, it all comes down to bias. Inside all of us we have an anchoring bias – we find it hard to understand things on their own, but find it easy to understand things in comparison.
And our natural comparison point is ourselves.
So, if you’re someone who is organised, people who are disorganised seem TOO disorganised. And people that are more organised that you, seem TOO organised.
We bring this bias (along with 100s more) into every interaction and every moment in our lives.
Consider these two examples which we see quite often in our client work:
Many managers score highly on Order (a facet of Conscientiousness in the TALY Personality Model). They thrive on detailed plans, structured timelines, checklists, and routines. They're often the ones who ensure deadlines are met and projects run like clockwork. But here's the blindspot: their need for control and clarity can sometimes overwhelm others. Plans may feel rigid, creativity might suffer, and teams may find situations "over-engineered," leaving little room for spontaneity, innovation, or experimentation.
In healthcare work, we see many people high on Flexibility, a facet of Agreeableness. These individuals often act to smooth tensions and happily go along with the ideas of others. Their flexibility can feel like a breath of fresh air, creating harmony and cooperation. Yet, this strength too can carry hidden drawbacks. By consistently yielding to others, their own valuable ideas and unique insights can become sidelined. In the long run, excessive flexibility risks stifling innovation, as their best ideas might quietly fade away for those who more stubbornly advocate for their own.
These examples highlight a key psychological insight… our most distinctive personality traits often limit our perspective without us realising it.
When operating solely from our strengths, we become prone to patterns that can undermine our effectiveness or relationships, especially when applied indiscriminately across different contexts.
How can you manage your blindspots positively?
It comes down to a critical skill—self-awareness.
Being able to recognise when our strengths begin to tip into blindspots empowers us to pause, reassess, and choose a more balanced approach. This doesn’t mean abandoning our natural tendencies; rather, it means consciously modulating our behaviour to match the context we're in.
That's precisely why the My Profile page on the new TALY platform is such a powerful tool.
It helps us clearly see not only where our strengths lie but also pinpoints those potential blindspots. Armed with this self-awareness, we gain greater flexibility and adaptability. We can continue leveraging our natural strengths while learning to step back, reflect, and recalibrate our behaviour where needed.
Some tips on how to use the My Profile page’s insights:
Own Your Personality!
Have a team or coaching session where you can openly share your TALY Personality. Talk openly about what this all means to you and one another, grounded in concrete facts and situations that you or the team has been through before. Nobody should feel like their personality is a problem, but rather, we’re all each pieces of a bigger picture.
Regular reflection
Schedule weekly or monthly check-ins with your TALY Personality profile to reflect on specific workplace interactions. Notice which strengths dominated and how they might have contributed to blindspots or tensions. Keeping a journal can be really helpful to accelerate the process, and track your development in a mindful way.
Ask for feedback
Use insights from your TALY profile to initiate targeted conversations with colleagues, explicitly asking about times when your strengths may unintentionally affect them or the team dynamic. It’s important for us to own our personality, and not be ashamed. Being open and asking for feedback will let us tune our behaviours so that we’re adapting appropriately.
Balance intentionally
Actively experiment with adjusting your dominant traits in specific situations, while being mindful. For example, if high Order is your strength, intentionally allow room for flexibility in creative meetings, observing how it impacts productivity and relationships in the moment. Pushing yourself out of your comfort zone
By understanding and harnessing this dual nature of personality strengths, we unlock our potential to thrive in more diverse situations, moving beyond unconscious repetition of patterns. After all, real growth happens when we bring intention to our actions—applying our strengths consciously, rather than letting them unconsciously dictate our behaviour.
Get in touch to find out more… we love talking about this stuff! Or Book a Demo today to see how easy it is to start using TALY in your business.