Knowing Your Weaknesses and Deciding Which Ones Matter

We all have strengths and weaknesses. Some of them are annoying but harmless. Others have real consequences. Over time, I have become very clear on the difference.

There are weaknesses I am happy to live with. They do not materially affect my life, my relationships or my business in a way that causes lasting problems. Then there are the ones where the impact is real, and where continuing to ignore them means accepting consequences I am not actually willing to carry.

That is where I do something about it.

One of my long-standing weaknesses is dates. They simply do not stick. It does not matter how much I love the person attached to the date, my brain treats them like Post-it notes without the sticky bit. They appear briefly, then disappear without a trace.

My son is incredible. I adore him. And yet, I once booked a work trip to Madrid over his birthday because the date held no significance in my head when I was booking flights. Last week, I nearly repeated the trick by planning a September trip that covered not only my husband’s birthday but also our anniversary. He was understandably unimpressed when he pointed it out. I am also taking my son out of school a week early to fly to Madrid because I had completely convinced myself term finished on 1 July. It does not.

None of this is dramatic or intentional. It is simply how my brain works.

The thing that finally forced me to stop and think was realising that these mistakes were not random. They were systemic. I do not have a process for personal dates. My diary is entirely business-focused. Meetings, deadlines, calls, travel. No birthdays. No anniversaries. No school terms. The absence of a system was producing predictable outcomes.

I was updating a client onboarding process earlier today when that realisation landed properly. In business, I am obsessed with processes. I know exactly why we do things a certain way, what gets captured, and how information flows. In my personal life, I had left a glaring gap and then seemed surprised when things kept going wrong.

So I have started the slow, slightly irritating task of properly updating my diary with important personal dates. Birthdays. School terms. Key family events. Not because I suddenly expect myself to remember them, but because I finally accepted that I will never remember them consistently without support.

Once I put a system in place, especially one born from frustration or repeated failure, I tend to stick to it. Not out of discipline, but out of self-awareness. I know that without the system, I will be just as rubbish again very quickly.

This is something I see constantly with the women I work with. There are areas of their business or personal life that cause friction every single time they come up. Tasks that are always delayed. Decisions that feel heavier than they should. Processes that do not exist, even though they are repeated weekly or monthly. Instead of fixing the root issue, they just accept the irritation as part of life.

The reality is that anything you curse at regularly is a candidate for a process, system or template.

For me, that belief is fundamental. I am naturally chaotic. The only reason I have been able to grow and scale businesses alongside that is because I take systems seriously. Not to make everything rigid, but to remove pressure from the areas where I know I am weak.

This week, I would encourage you to look at one thing you resent doing every time it appears. If it keeps costing you time, energy or emotional bandwidth, stop pushing through it and fix it properly. You do not have to be good at everything, but you do need to be honest about which weaknesses you can live with and which ones you cannot.

That clarity alone makes life and business far easier to manage.