In my last post, I wrote about the importance of being grateful for the opportunity to learn, even when you don’t particularly like a subject, a teacher, or a situation you find yourself in. I focused on how this gratitude can help you develop a more positive outlook about your studies and lead to you increasing the effort you put into your work and the success you see. Though it may not always be easy to be grateful for the opportunity to learn, it will develop your study skills. Therefore, it is well worth the effort it will take, not just to be grateful for the opportunity to learn, but also to share your gratitude with those who have helped you along the way. In this post, I will expand on the idea of being grateful for your studies, as well as for everything you can learn and do and be outside of school, by focusing more on your strengths than on your challenges. In my last post, I suggested that being grateful for teachers and subjects you like and expressing gratitude to those teachers is one way to keep from taking those subjects and teachers for granted. In this post, I will add that being grateful for your own strengths, gifts, and talents can help you, not only to not take them for granted, but also to remember that they can be an important part of improving your study skills.
As a special education teacher, one of my favorite parts of my personal philosophy was that I liked to use my strengths to help my students improve their weaknesses. Since so many of them had learning challenges that were opposite to my own, their strengths were often opposite to mine as well. As I have stated before, and as should be apparent when you read my blog, writing is one of my strengths. I never ceased to be grateful that I could use it to help my students, just as I had always been grateful to be able to rely on it as a student. I always understood how important my ability to write well was, not just to achieve good grades in classes that required a lot of writing, but also to use it to compensate for weaknesses in other areas. Whenever I was confronted with a class, concept, or activity that was adversely impacted by my learning challenges, I took advantage of every chance I had to write whatever I could to help me through it. In addition to using my strengths to help my students with their weaknesses, I also encouraged them to do as I had done and take advantage of opportunities to use their strengths. What writing was to me, art, technology, or any number of things could be to them, and in addition to helping themselves by using their talents, they were often able to help their classmates and me as well. Whatever your gift is – whatever that one skill is that you wish could be a part of absolutely everything you do, both in school and out – being grateful for it and not taking it for granted is the best way to ensure that you will use it to assist both yourself and others whenever an opportunity presents itself.
In addition to not taking them for granted and using them to compensate for your weaknesses, another way in which being grateful for your strengths and gifts can be an important part of improving your study skills is that it can help you put them in the proper perspective. Seeing your strengths and talents as gifts to be appreciated is a good way to keep yourself from having too much pride in them. Not only will this keep you from bragging to your classmates when you think something is easy that they find challenging, but it will also serve as a reminder that being good at something does not mean you don’t still need to put effort into it, or that you don’t still have a lot to learn. It is human nature to believe that if you are good at something, you know just what to do, and can do it your own way in your own time, without need of direction, assistance, or effort of any kind. While this may be true sometimes, it is not true all the time, and just as I became a better writer throughout my years of schooling by striving to meet the expectations of teachers and professors, so I also became a better writer by taking constructive criticism during the editing process from them, as well as from my peers. Whatever your strength or talent may be, bear in mind that you have teachers who are ready and willing to help you develop it, and that striving to meet their expectations will not only allow you to achieve greater success with it, but will also allow you to apply what you’ve learned to your more challenging subjects.
No matter how busy you get, or how challenging your studies may be, another way to be grateful for your strengths and gifts is to make time for them, especially in ways that have nothing to do with school or any organized activity. No matter how much writing I had to do for school, I always made time to write for myself as well. Through all my years of teaching, and even now as I work on my website, I still make time to write for myself, to write because it’s fun, and to write because I simply love to do it. Whatever your strength or talent may be, whether a subject, a skill, an activity, a sport, whatever it is, making time to do it purely for the love of it is one of the best ways to remember to be grateful for it. Doing the thing you love most for the pure joy of doing it can be very relaxing and rejuvenating, and can also help you develop your study skills, because it can provide the outlet and break you need so you can come back to your studies refreshed and refocused. Knowing that you will make time for the thing you love most, and even writing it into your schedule to make sure of it, will remind you not to take it for granted, and will also make it easier to be more positive about everything else you need to do.
As important as it is to be grateful for the opportunity to learn, it is even more important to be grateful for your strengths, gifts, and talents, because they can sustain you through any challenges you may face. If you put them in the proper perspective, your strengths can help you compensate for your weaknesses, which can in turn help you improve your study skills. No matter how good you are at something, remember that you can still work at it to make it even better, but remember, too, that making time to do it for the love of it matters. Not only will that keep you from taking it for granted, it will also remind you to always be grateful for the positive place it has in your life.