Discover Your Key Components

There’s more to self-discovery than just knowing your favourite colour. Nashrah Ghazali helps you understand your key-components better.

DISCOVER YOUR KEY COMPONENTS

There are many aspects within yourself to be discovered to ease your journey in this road towards university. It’s important – just read on. Please. Without further ado, let’s jump right into things that you should start thinking about.

Skills

There are two kinds of skills that you will constantly hear of: soft skills and hard skills. Soft skills refer to people skills. These include communication, networking and leadership skills, amongst other things. (Google ‘soft skills’ for a more in-depth explanation!) Hard skills, on other hand, refer to technical skills. What does technical even mean? Technical skills are the abilities and knowledge needed to perform specific tasks. These include writing skills, speaking a foreign language and even speed typing. It’s crucial for you to identify the skills that you already have and polish them. You should also have a clear understanding of the skills that you need to gain in order to achieve your goals. Interests

Interest is a feeling that causes us to focus on a particular subject matter. Say, you enjoy Biology in school, it is probably because you have an interest in human anatomy. Everyone has things that they like and dislike but most don’t really bother to pay attention to them. Now, do you know what YOU are interested in? Instead of being one with the crowd that proclaims ‘I don’t know’ whenever their interests come into question, why don’t you start thinking about this right now? It’s never too early or too late to discover your interests.

At this point, you have a lot to think about: skills, interests, strengths and weaknesses. Seems overwhelming, but it will pay off in the long run. Understanding yourself is the first step in choosing what to do once you’re done with secondary school. Take your time to jot it down in our little memo pad!

Strengths

Let’s take Hulk and Quicksilver for an example. Hulk is strong but because of his huge figure, he’s not very fast. Quicksilver, on the other hand, has super speed which means he’s really, really fast. Point here is that each of us has our own strengths. We should never compare ourselves to other people because we are our own person. Okay, let’s take a step back and understand what it is – strengths are strong points and beneficial qualities that you have. Perhaps you’re good at science experiments, perhaps you have great hand at art, or even a good logic for mathematics. So, what is it? Weaknesses

As we know, strengths and weaknesses come hand in hand. But why should you keep in check with your weaknesses – shouldn’t you just keep it in a box and push it to the back of your mind? No. You should acknowledge your weaknesses. The reason why you need to be aware of your weaknesses is because you need to accept them as part of who you are. The thing about weaknesses is that some are easier to work on and some are harder to manage. So, you need to have a clear list of these two categories. If you talk too much, you can simply tone it down a notch but if you get distracted really easily then it will take a lot more practice for you to work on that.