What If Your Biggest Weakness Is Actually One of Your Greatest Strengths?

"I'm just an overthinker.” 

For years, I thought that was just part of who I was. I used to say it the way you'd mention your star sign. A bit of a shrug, no further investigation required. It was just something I'd accepted about myself. Then one day I caught myself saying it to my son.

He looked at me and asked, "Are people born overthinkers?" Boom, once again I was reminded how kids have this incredible way of shining lights on assumptions, because their brains haven’t yet been conditioned and it reminded me of a session I had with a corporate coach years earlier.

Where the Skill Actually Came From

While I was still in corporate, a coach ran me through a set of exercises to figure out what actually lit me up at work. Unlike most of these exercises, she wasn't interested in what I was good at; she wanted to know what I loved.

I hadn't gone in with a theory. I told her about teaching before corporate, how I chose schools with the highest behavioural challenges, telling myself it was because I wanted to make a difference. I told her about economics, the first subject I'd ever truly loved, obsessed with the way inflation and interest rates leaned on each other, happily talking about it to anyone who would listen. I told her about the corporate roles I'd loved most, never the neat, linear ones, always the messy ones that cut across marketing, fulfilment and operations, analytics, IT, martech, customer service, loyalty and design, where nothing lived in its own lane.

I hadn't seen the thread connecting any of it, but she did.

She simply said,

"You love solving complex problems."

I remember sitting there thinking... of course I do.

Suddenly everything made sense. The schools. Economics. The roles I gravitated towards. My love of data analytics and the way, even now, nothing lights me up quite like a huge data set and the chance to run scenarios and models to uncover the insight hidden within it.

It also explained why I eventually chose to leave corporate and start a coaching business working with already-successful women. What I love most isn't telling people what to do. It's helping them solve the complex problems they can't quite see on their own.

The Same Skill, Pointed at the Wrong Target

So when my son asked whether people are born overthinkers, I already knew part of the answer. I was someone who loved solving complex problems. What I hadn't realised until that moment was that while this strength had served me brilliantly at work, I'd also started applying it everywhere else.

Instead of solving meaningful problems, my brain was trying to solve uncertainty. Discomfort. Decisions that simply couldn't be solved through more thinking. It was rehearsing conversations before they happened. Analysing emails I hadn't even sent. Thinking about tomorrow while I was still living today. Searching for certainty where certainty simply wasn't available.

None of those were actually complex problems, but my brain treated them as if they were.

It was an aha moment, and almost an embarrassing one. I'd spent years teaching my own teams about strengths overplayed, and I genuinely thought I understood mine. But this particular strength had been responsible for so much of my success that it had never occurred to me to look at it that way.

Once I did, the exhaustion made sense. It wasn't that something was wrong with my brain. I was simply taking a strength that solved genuinely complex problems brilliantly in one area of my life and pointing it at a completely different kind of problem in another. Replaying the same conversation for the tenth time isn't a complex problem, it's discomfort.

But my brain couldn't tell the difference, so it reached for the tool it knew best….More thinking.

The Question That Changed It

For years I thought the solution was to stop overthinking. I tried quieting my mind, distracting myself and telling myself to stop analysing everything.

None of it worked though because I wasn't fighting a weakness, I was trying to suppress a strength that had contributed to so much of my success.

Now, when I notice my mind racing ahead to solve something that doesn't exist yet, I ask myself one question:

"Is this helping me right now?"

Sometimes the answer is yes. If I'm working through a genuinely complex problem, I let myself lean all the way in, because that's where I do some of my best thinking.

More often than not, though, the answer is no.

I'm simply trying to solve discomfort, and overthinking definitely does not solve that.

That one question creates just enough space to put my attention somewhere more useful. Instead of trying to solve the problem my mind has invented, I can start addressing what's actually going on.

Changing the Label

I don't think overthinking is the only label doing this to people.

Perfectionism often starts with caring deeply.

People pleasing often starts with empathy and connection.

Needing control often comes from responsibility.

Overthinking often starts with curiosity, intelligence and a genuine ability to see complexity.

The strength itself was never the problem, the problem is when it becomes our automatic response to discomfort.

So if you've ever caught yourself saying, "That's just the way I am," I'd encourage you to get curious instead.

Rather than asking, "What's wrong with me?", try asking:

"What strength might I be overplaying here?"

Because what we think is a personality flaw is often a strength that's simply being applied in the wrong place.

And sometimes changing your life doesn't start by fixing yourself. It starts by understanding yourself properly.