{"version":"1.0","provider_url":"https:\/\/warpwire.duke.edu","provider_name":"Warpwire","is_public":true,"duration":0,"has_caption":true,"links":{"caption":[{"label":"English","url":"https:\/\/warpwire.duke.edu\/api\/caption\/vYUIAA\/327385\/vtt\/?nonce=a4b12bbe6f8c55c76b9c1cdb9fcbba69&expiration=1787371200&signature=8bedf5c4ca34f81af13e648b262de8afd11e18bf543ebde13f9f43c51800a739"}]},"views":1,"upload_date":"2024-10-04T14:01:01+00:00","description":"Joining the podcast team today is Jaime Byrd, Director of Employer Relations at the Duke Career Center as they discuss an answer, or many, to the question \u2013what are my strengths and weaknesses? \r\n \r\nStrengths and Weaknesses\u2013 You have probably heard, \u201cWhen talking about weaknesses, try to turn them into a strength\u2026\u201d Well, is that really all you have to do? Equally confusing, is the advice of making a strength a perceived weakness, for example,\u201d Sometimes, I work too hard,\u201d comes across as disingenuous. As flawed, yet skilled individuals, how should we respond? \r\n\r\nTranscript:\r\n- Hello and welcome to the \"What's Career Got To Do With It\" podcast, where we hope to provide a space for honest conversation and information that encourages the listener to take the next steps in their career journey. Wherever you're at in this process, we hope this episode will meet you with affirmation, guidance, and maybe some laughs along the way.\r\n\r\n- Joining us today is Jamie Byrd, director of Employer Relations at the Duke Career Center as we discuss and answer for many to the question, what are my strengths? And tell me all my weaknesses. No, that's not a question. And what are my weaknesses?\r\n\r\n- Uh huh.\r\n\r\n- Hey, Jaime.\r\n\r\n- Good morning! Thank you for having me.\r\n\r\n- My first true boss! You know I love you, Jaime.\r\n\r\n- Love you back. So good to be here. Thanks for having me.\r\n\r\n- So today we're talking about something that I think students often want to discuss in the interview process or just in general, even in networking of like, this is who I am, I know my strengths or I have no idea of my strengths. And then like I think in particular, having worked at Duke now, I've seen a lot of students who really want to focus on their weaknesses and be like, \"How do I overcome this? This seems terrible. It seems like the worst thing. Like how do I even reframe that?\" Because I think there's also a general understanding of like, oh you just reframe this weakness to turn it into a strength. That's what you always do. And I think it's a little bit more complicated than that. But Jaime, before we dive into those deep questions surrounding, how you can be a stronger person, what is weakness, what is failure, we'd love to hear from you a little bit about your career journey and how you got to where you are today. Yeah.\r\n\r\n- Well, good morning. Thanks again for having me. My career journey has been not a straight line. It's been kind of all over the map, but I have found my spot in student affairs and higher education over the last decade or so. When I was an undergraduate student, I was one of those kids that had multiple different majors. I was a business major for a while. Then I was an English major, then I was a communications major, which I stuck with. And then I added public relations and journalism to kind of round out some of that studying. But honestly, when I was in college, I went to a really small private school and I was involved in a lot of things, and I got to interface with a lot of student affairs staff, and I loved working with them. And so by the time I graduated, I thought, \"How can I do what they do?\" So I ended up going to get my master's in higher ed student affairs, and the rest is kind of history. I've been in student affairs ever since. So it's been 12 years, 13 years, and a decade of that's been here at Duke. So it's been a fun ride. Hopefully I'm not changing careers anytime soon.\r\n\r\n- You never know, you never know.\r\n\r\n- We won't let you go. We can't.\r\n\r\n- I always like to think like student affairs is like, a microcosm of the world outside as well, because like you have people trying to make it happen and trying to like be professional but then also you throw students in there and it just becomes like this whole background of a mess. But that's like the world. You get out there and you're trying to adult, you're trying to do the professional thing, but then life happens, people happen. There's maniacs on the road out there driving.\r\n\r\n- Who try to merge into the lane at the very last minute and won't get over earlier.\r\n\r\n- And for me on 147,\r\n\r\n- Oh okay, real.\r\n\r\n- It's a zipper merge.\r\n\r\n- No turning signal, no thank you. No, thank you.* But yeah, so we try to do all these things in our career. And Jaime, I appreciate you going through your trajectory to normalize the concept of finding something and going with it and just meandering and going in your path and just saying, \"Hey, this is what I want to do. I'm gonna go give it a try. Oh, it seems to be working. I'm gonna stick with it. I'm gonna go with it.\" And I'm sure there was moments where there was just like, \"I don't know about this. Should I really stick with this?\" Do you mind sharing a little bit about that?\r\n\r\n- Yeah, absolutely. So when I started in student affairs, right after my master's, I was doing more student facing work, particularly in programming and residence life. And I loved my experience doing that. It set a really great foundation for what I can do now in my current role, even. But I was tired. Honestly the hours were long, and it was not a long-term situation for me to be in. So I did that for a few years and then I transitioned over to the career center actually. I've actually spent a good chunk of my professional career at Duke and generally here in the career center. And I found a good niche with my current role, 'cause I feel like I'm able to have one foot in higher ed, working with students, working in the university setting, but then also getting that other foot outside of the university because my role is really working with external stakeholders, right, and all of those companies that come to recruit all of you fine students. So I found that as a really great balance for me personally. And it's kept things interesting because I have both of those aspects of the day to day with different people that I'm interfacing with. But depending on the day, some days I'm like, \"Am I gonna do this long term?\" You never know. You never know.\r\n\r\n- But I think you should always be thinking like that though.\r\n\r\n- You really should.\r\n\r\n- Shouldn't be stuck.\r\n\r\n- You really should.\r\n\r\n- Yeah.\r\n\r\n- Okay. We've missed you, Kai. If y'all could see these looks right now.\r\n\r\n- I don't know why you're looking at me like that.\r\n\r\n- I feel like you got more to say. What question comes to your mind right now? Adaptability is the length of care.\r\n\r\n- Now what you cannot say is, \"Kai, you took in the wrong direction,\" 'cause I do have a thought that I do want to ask Jaime, but I don't want to kind of shut y'all out.\r\n\r\n- No, got for it!\r\n\r\n- Okay.\r\n\r\n- We're here, we're here.\r\n\r\n- Because we know you're directing things, I just wanna make sure I'm following your orders, sir.\r\n\r\n- Why am I directing things?\r\n\r\n- Strengths and weaknesses, I'm following orders. Trying to work on that weakness, following orders. No, when you were talking, Jaime, about like what you studied in undergrad and then how you switched to higher ed for grad study, when you were thinking about your own strengths and weaknesses and like, how you either interview for grad school or think about your strengths and weaknesses within the confines of a certain area of study, did you see those strengths and weaknesses changing or modifying in any way? That was the first thing that came to mind for me.\r\n\r\n- I think they definitely modified along the way, or it might've been that I was able to more fully recognize what my strengths and weaknesses were. Maybe I just had, not necessarily a false perception, but not fully knowing myself. I was still young and trying to figure it out. So I think part of that just came with getting to know myself better and what I was passionate about and what worked for me. I think something too, like I went in thinking, \"Oh, I could do like more business type of role. I'm gonna study business and finance.\" And although great, it just wasn't a fit with my personality and the work landscape I wanted to be a part of. So I kind of started to recognize too, within those strengths and weaknesses, where am I going to thrive and where am I maybe going to be a weaker version of myself even. And that's why I started to pivot and do different majors. And I think some of that too in the career track has been true for me. Being in residence life and doing student programming was great. I loved it. I'm an extrovert and I love being with people and with students.\r\n\r\n- You are.\r\n\r\n- Oh.\r\n\r\n- Yeah, yeah.\r\n\r\n- But also just balancing like what actually fits for my life.\r\n\r\n- Right.\r\n\r\n- Like is this a weakness for me even because I can't like fully be passionate about what I'm doing? 'Cause it's just not like a balance for me. So I think for me, some of it's just getting to know myself, but then also getting to know like I'm changing and evolving and learning. Some of these strengths and weaknesses are changing, and what am I bringing to the role or even my major?\r\n\r\n- Right, right.\r\n\r\n- Does that answer your question?\r\n\r\n- Yeah, yeah.\r\n\r\n- And that wasn't off topic.\r\n\r\n- It wasn't.\r\n\r\n- Oh I was just making sure.\r\n\r\n- I was rolling in my head too.\r\n\r\n- I was just making sure because you know you be sliding us notes during the recording sessions, like, hey change this. I believe. But you be sliding us notes saying don't ask that question. I'm like, okay. Yes sir.\r\n\r\n- I have never once done that.\r\n\r\n- At all.\r\n\r\n- See how I spin to make my lie up?\r\n\r\n- You might've seen a note in the document.\r\n\r\n- Oh, I love being messy.\r\n\r\n- We need a truth-o-meter.\r\n\r\n- I love being messy.\r\n\r\n- Jaime, I appreciate that response because I think it demystifies that we often would go and try to label these things in an interview and that's how we would prepare. Like, 'Hey all right, I've been told that this is a strength of mine, or I've been told that this is a weakness of mine,\" but you're just talking about your career journey and you ultimately use the term weakness later on. But I think you begin with like a different thing. What do I wanna do? Discernment, that's a strength. Like you can discern something and make a step and make a decision and and go to the next level. And that's how I think we want to encourage students to think about these questions is that you don't have to always have a label attached to you in order to be able to answer this question about a strength or weaknesses or weakness. It can be something that you have done throughout your journey, whether it be in high school, in undergrad or in your grad program or in a job outside of this internship where you've just been doing something and you've made a decision here or there, or you pivoted or you're doing something else now. That can be considered a strength or weakness and we can talk through that and we can adapt it.\r\n\r\n- I even think sometimes in that mode where students get stuck in weakness, like you say, \"I can't do this, I can't do this,\" you know, sometimes it's almost like they say, practice makes perfect, it's because you don't do it enough. And I think we've all been thrown into situations where we're like, \"Yeah, I don't think I can do this. This is not my strong suit,\" But we don't have a choice but to face and work through the problem. And then you realize like, \"Oh, it's not that bad 'cause I gotta do it all the time. That's not my favorite, but I definitely can get it done and it's done like it needs to be, too.\" So I think that's a thought process as well, surrounding weaknesses, AKA areas of improvement.\r\n\r\n- I love that.\r\n\r\n- And I think I do wanna touch on something that is becoming more common in a good way and well, depending on who you ask, but that the concept of weakness being this bad thing. I think acknowledging that we are better at some things than others and then fully leaning into that we don't have to do everything and be good at everything and always try to improve upon our weakness. We conduct an assessment in our office called strengths profiler and part of it is just like, hey, this weakness, we are going to say, where can we just start doing our strengths more here instead of just really focusing on this weakness. If my weakness is time management, then I'm gonna go find another strength that I have where I can lean into that and then maybe surround myself with people who are really good at time management to help me out because help is a good thing and weakness is not necessarily a bad thing. It has nothing to do with the way that the world wants you to be, either. I'm curious in anybody's thoughts surrounding that.\r\n\r\n- I mean, I think that's such a true point because we all have weaknesses. It's not like any of us are lacking a weakness. And my role obviously interfaces more with the employer side of this process and our office's work. And I think sometimes there's this, I don't wanna say stigma, but there's this belief that, oh, if I admit a weakness to an employer,\r\n\r\n- Yeah.\r\n\r\n- This is going to tank my interview or they're going to think less of me, so I need to make it into a strength or I need to make it look positive. But I think part of my work with employers, I found that employers also want to know that you're human and you have the ability to adapt and pivot and exercise soft skills and just be a genuine person. So I think being able to address some of those weaknesses is just admitting that we are human. So I usually am trying to tell any student too that I'm working with, like if you're talking about weaknesses to an employer, instead of saying like, oh this is a negative, it's a weakness, just saying like, \"Here's my strength that balances it out.\" I even tell them like, \"How do you address your weakness?\" Maybe it's your time management piece, right? Say, \"Hey, I struggle with time management, but these are the ways that I compensate for that. These are the ways that I set up success for myself, knowing that weakness.\" And I think knowing yourself really shows a lot, especially in the interview process to an employer. So those weaknesses, they're not necessarily bad. We've all have them. Don't be scared to admit them.\r\n\r\n- I was just kind of thinking like, the strength is knowing the weakness. And following me, right?\r\n\r\n- Yeah.\r\n\r\n- Because as you evolve into positions and roles and experiences, you're gonna find like, \"Okay yeah, this is not my strong point.\" And this goes to all the conversations that we have. It's who you surround yourself with, what you see, check your environment. So like the team I work on, I know this person can do this, I can throw it in their hands, it'll be fine. I don't have to worry about it. So the strength is knowing who's around you in your space and then adding to what Jaime said, \"Then what can I do? Can I piggyback them? Can I watch them? What method are they using to help me get to where I need to be?\"\r\n\r\n- Yeah, and what's so interesting about us doing this conversation today is that we've got the career fair next week. And so most of the student appointments that I'm having this week are about this sort of thing of like, are employers really human? Do they really remember that, or are they able to come into that interview setting, students saying, okay, these are my strengths and weaknesses, and not feel like they're gonna be judged in that sort of setting? And so I think one of the hopes of, I think like an episode of like, this is like telling students, it's okay to kind of calm yourself down in the sense to understand and remember that they're gonna recognize you as a human first, hopefully, especially if they're working with us, period. But, you know, to remember that it's okay to kind of talk about some of those things. So I think that's really cool that we're talking about that now.\r\n\r\n- For sure. And when I used to coach, we relied upon the John Wooden Pyramid of Success because, you know, you have to follow all the stereotypes in sports and all that good stuff. And oh, this person was successful, so we must do exactly what they do. Anyways, if someone made a mistake or they were kind of joking around or they weren't aware of something, we would yell \"Level two, block two!\" We would just like point at 'em, or at least I would.\r\n\r\n- Ooh, that just triggered me back to football practice on the sideline.\r\n\r\n- Because level two, block two of the John Wooden Pyramid of Success is awareness. And awareness doesn't have to be this impending thing, like it was then because, you know, football has a lot of its own issues as far as hyper-masculinity and other things that I won't get it to, but.\r\n\r\n- That's another episode.\r\n\r\n- Yes. Awareness of who you are as a person in the career development process, knowing yourself and knowing what you're good at, and also knowing, hey, where you need help. I don't even wanna necessarily use the term weakness, all the time, because sometimes it's just where you need a little bit of assistance and I think we should normalize that you need assistance in areas because you're not this perfect person. And that's a larger discussion at Duke and should be a larger discussion in the world, is that you don't have to be perfect in every aspect because some things need time and practice. Now you may excel more quickly at some things than others. You may be able to do things more naturally than others, and that is fantastic and wonderful. So lean into those things, but don't harp on those things that take you a little bit of time to pick up. I was terrible at cooking when I first started cooking, and now I'm just a little bit better.\r\n\r\n- Yeah!\r\n\r\n- Just a little bit better.\r\n\r\n- Wait, can I ask you a question?\r\n\r\n- Go ahead.\r\n\r\n- What was your first dish you ever burnt?\r\n\r\n- Ooh!\r\n\r\n- First...\r\n\r\n- That you like, cooked bad.\r\n\r\n- Like, ooh.\r\n\r\n- Well, nevermind, nevermind!\r\n\r\n- It's always gonna be chicken.\r\n\r\n- Okay, okay.\r\n\r\n- It's always gonna be chicken because I would put it in the oven, forget about it, which is terrible.\r\n\r\n- Oh no, rule number one.\r\n\r\n- Tastes like wood.\r\n\r\n- Just like, this burnt to a crisp.\r\n\r\n- Oh my gosh.\r\n\r\n- I did that with bacon one time too. I can tell you both times that I burned it to a crisp that I just said, \"I'm hungry.\"\r\n\r\n- That's what I'm saying! You still ate it, didn't you?\r\n\r\n- I'm gonna go at least take a bite, see what it's like.\r\n\r\n- But burned bacon is not bad.\r\n\r\n- It's really not that bad.\r\n\r\n- But Angela.\r\n\r\n- Oh, okay.\r\n\r\n- It was stuck to the pan like, looked like a forest fire had just run through there, tree bark burnt black using charcoal.\r\n\r\n- Yeah, it was charcoal.\r\n\r\n- Okay, okay.\r\n\r\n- But it's a learning process, right?\r\n\r\n- It's a learning process.\r\n\r\n- You're not burning the bacon these days, are you?\r\n\r\n- No, no.\r\n\r\n- See?\r\n\r\n- I watch it on a skillet.\r\n\r\n- That's a good turnaround.\r\n\r\n- I don't put it in the oven. So I adapted.\r\n\r\n- Yeah.\r\n\r\n- There you have it.\r\n\r\n- I had some self awareness.\r\n\r\n- You work and improve the weakness. That's good. Yeah, we're trying, We're trying daily.\r\n\r\n- But that's the thing, too, is we get to keep trying, keep trying the things in life you can improve upon. And I think that goes to a larger conversation too of failure and being frustrated by failure and knowing that like, well, I'm just trying to turn this and reframe this into a strength. Sometimes you just let it go. You're not gonna reframe it into a strength, but you can build upon your other strengths. That's the other cool thing. I'm not just sitting here plugging this because we run students through this assessment, but I appreciate the language it gives students as far as what's called unrealized strengths.\r\n\r\n- Yeah.\r\n\r\n- And that's the strengths assessment, is we have unrealized strengths in our lives that we may not even see in ourselves. And that's the importance of surrounding yourself with people who can find those unrealized strengths in our lives of like, \"Hey, actually you're really good at this. Have you ever noticed this?\" And I'm curious from the room, what are some of the unrealized strengths that maybe people have spoken into your life or maybe that you found on an assessment?\r\n\r\n- Oh God.\r\n\r\n- That's a good question.\r\n\r\n- Yeah. I'm trying to remember.\r\n\r\n- I would say for me, yeah, it initially was unrealized 'cause I didn't know what it was, it was just in my niche. It was kind of like assessing and looking at things and looking a little deeper, 'cause I would be the one to just sit back and watch and not say anything because I'm always watching and someone's like, \"You know, you have a really good like way of just like, looking deeper into it and not like taking it like too far over the head, but just really diving deep sometimes.\" I think that's me.\r\n\r\n- I see that.\r\n\r\n- Did you have yours, Jaime? I don't wanna cut you off. I'm still thinking and I took this assessment and I don't even remember.\r\n\r\n- You don't remember?\r\n\r\n- One that I can think of that is kind of split between work and family, so like my family will call it being stubborn, but then like in other areas, people call it like ambitious.\r\n\r\n- Mm.\r\n\r\n- And so like, it's been one of the things where I've like, I know for me, like once I set my mind to a task or a goal or like a benchmark for myself, I do everything in my power to make sure that that benchmarking goal is set. And I can see it on both sides where you're so focused on it that you lose flexibility and like adjusting things to give yourself options to consider outside of what you set for yourself. But at the same time, I've also seen that persistence and dedication be great for like practicing and showing commitment, which I think is good, a lot of times. So I think that's one of the ones where I don't realize it, but people will say like, \"Oh you're really,\" or \"Oh you're really.\" So it just depends on like who I'm around when they notice it or what it's with.\r\n\r\n- Can I jump in right quick? One of the ways that I realized this unrealized strength is because I had one of my former deans and who is one of my mentors, he would hate to see me come in and ask a question 'cause he was like, \"Why are you thinking so deep about it?\" I'm like, \"But why aren't you?\" Like, and then that's when he started asking these questions. I'm like, \"Oh, okay.\" \"But do you understand what I'm saying?\" And it was like a, \"Yes, you're right.\"\r\n\r\n- I don't remember if it was part of my unrealized strengths, but I think it was in this same kind of vein of thinking. One of the things I didn't realize that I was able to really do or had a strength of doing is kind of reading the room. I've had people bring that up to me a couple of times and it's something I was always like, \"Nah, I don't do that.\" But as I've gone further into my career and I have teams of people that work under my roles, I've started to kind of realize that I do have an awareness of reading the room with the people that I'm working with. And that's something I never would've thought about myself before. And it might be reading the room, like, \"Oh, there's a tension here, someone stressed about this or that,\" or, \"Oh, someone might be struggling with something outside of work.\" So that's something that I've noticed has developed for me as more of a strength over the last handful of years. But I was oblivious to it until a couple people had mentioned it.\r\n\r\n- That's true. Many ER team days.\r\n\r\n- We spent some nice time,\r\n\r\n- Yeah.\r\n\r\n- On the ER team together.\r\n\r\n- You would level things out and be like, \"Hey, so how are y'all doing first?\" And we'd spend a good couple minutes talking with her.\r\n\r\n- Human first.\r\n\r\n- Yeah.\r\n\r\n- Colleague second.\r\n\r\n- Mhm.\r\n\r\n- Yeah, yeah.\r\n\r\n- She not lying, y'all. Now I might tell a lie here or there.\r\n\r\n- Thanks for backing me up.\r\n\r\n- Tell a lie here or there. Yeah. You're welcome. I hit one. I didn't know it was gonna come out. The speaker took a second.\r\n\r\n- I heard it.\r\n\r\n- That's perfect. All right. As we kind of, I was gonna say conclude.\r\n\r\n- I like the combination.\r\n\r\n- Con-close.\r\n\r\n- Con-close.\r\n\r\n- There we go.\r\n\r\n- New word.\r\n\r\n- As we kind of con-close out here, I would love to do a takeaway for students and listeners as a whole of when it comes to the conversation of strengths and weaknesses. What's your one bit of advice? And we'll go around in a circle.\r\n\r\n- Okay Rudy.\r\n\r\n- I think my advice would be not to overthink it, like, especially if you're preparing for an interview, like having in mind what your strengthens and weaknesses are is important because you could very well be asked that. But I think also not overthinking it and being so overly critical of yourself is really important because like we've all talked about, like, we're all human, we all have strengths and weaknesses and it's not necessarily a bad thing. So don't come in it feeling shame about your weakness, right? Don't overthink it and just talk genuinely about who you are and where those strengths and weaknesses lie.\r\n\r\n- I think I'm gonna go with what popped in my head when y'all gave me the look. So it must have been okay. The strength is knowing the weakness.\r\n\r\n- Yep.\r\n\r\n- Yes! And just being able to know where you are, know where you stand and articulate and show what you're good at, and showing that in that space, you're still flexible and adaptable and can still learn.\r\n\r\n- Yes, yes. I love that. When you said that earlier, I was like, that's it.\r\n\r\n- I'm gonna give myself a snap.\r\n\r\n- Wait, can you say it one more time for people like me that already have not remembered it?\r\n\r\n- The strength is knowing your weakness.\r\n\r\n- Yes.\r\n\r\n- Love that.\r\n\r\n- Yes.\r\n\r\n- And I think when we tell people all the time that self-reflection, self-evaluation is important. So when you take the time to really sit and accept those things about yourself, you breed authenticity, which shows up in your interview, which relieves some of that pressure of like, \"Will I get this job?\" It doesn't matter because you showed up as your authentic self. And it all will work out the way it's supposed to be.\r\n\r\n- Mm.\r\n\r\n- That's right. And I think surrounding yourself with people who help you lean into those best parts of yourself and don't hold any of those things that you may not like about yourself or may be frustrated about yourself. Don't hold any of those things against you. They actually support you and don't even really care about those things at all. They accept you for who you are and care about you and love you and support you. And I think this has been \"What's Career Got To Do With It.\"\r\n\r\n- Wait a minute, did I say authentisic? Authentic. I made up another word.\r\n\r\n- Ciao.\r\n\r\n- Ha, that was great. Did you know that was there?\r\n\r\n- Blame it on the countryside of my family, you know? You know you had Ts and Cs and places. Okay. Self-reflection, evaluation to yourself.\r\n\r\n- I love that. This has been the \"What's Career Got To Do With It\" podcast. We hope to see you again.\r\n\r\n- Bye, y'all.","author_name":"Sandhya Pakala","html":"\u003Ciframe width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/warpwire.duke.edu\/w\/vYUIAA\/\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media; camera; microphone; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen\u003E\u003C\/iframe\u003E","height":360,"width":640,"thumbnail_height":360,"thumbnail_width":640,"url":"https:\/\/warpwire.duke.edu\/w\/vYUIAA\/","type":"video","title":"Preparing for the Interview \u2013What are my strengths?","thumbnail_url":"https:\/\/warpwire.duke.edu\/img\/10ED13AE-DB77-4E78-BDAA-21F9B14D30E1\/E1B3C9BA-63C5-4801-A6FB-8F260EC51855\/large\/"}