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52 Examples of Unique Strengths

John Spacey, updated on April 27, 2023

Unique strengths are character traits, talents and knowledge that don't sound like cliches. Unfortunately, media and industry tend to use the same terms over and over again to describe desirable professional and personal strengths such that these terms become stale. In this context, using unique terms to describe your strengths, can wake up your audience and make you stand out as real. The following are illustrative examples.

Prototyping	Designing experiments
Agent of change	Intellectual curiosity
Grit	Setting direction
Narrative crafting	Listening with intent to understand
Building trust	Building and leveraging social proof
Persuasive writing	Winning debates
Overcoming objections	Intelligent risk taking
Generating ideas	Finding the good and potential in people
Self-awareness	Self-monitoring
Self-discipline	Initiative
Emotional restraint	Embracing challenges and discomfort
Self-control	Productive energy
Dealing with ambiguity	Service recovery – turning around customer dissatisfaction
Sidelining distractions	Triage – quickly prioritizing urgent work
Developing metrics and measurements	Root cause analysis – looking for the deeper cause of problems
Cutting costs	Dealing with constraints – delivering results with little time or budget
Challenging assumptions	Building on the ideas of others
Finding value in failure	Quick learner
Determination	Taking ownership
Commanding presence	Being genuine and direct
Poise under pressure	Establishing credibility
Challenging the status quo	Defeating resistance to change
Setting high expectations for yourself and others	Delivering to commitments
Delivering high quality work	Enthusiasm for your role / profession / industry
Clearing issues	Making timely decisions in an environment of ambiguity and change
Persuasive presentations	Visual storytelling

In many cases, it is possible to use original language to describe standard skills. For example, people almost always use the term "active listening" to describe listening strengths. This can be reframed in any number of unique ways such as "listening closely when people talk."