When you cop to your shortcomings a number of wonderful things can happen.

You become more accessible to the people around you, you invite other people to step up and shine, and you create space for support to come into your life — you actually don’t have to be awesome at everything. Go figure.

Mostly, when you approve of your weaknesses, you give yourself permission to pursue your genius.

So what do you suck at?

I’ll go first. I suck at:

All forms of baking. I’ve never met a muffin tin or batter that liked me. (Might have something to do with my resistance to following directions.)

I’m not great at apologizing. I get stuck at feeling ashamed and so I divert my focus to how I’ll make it better next time, rather than on what I actually did wrong. But I’ve come a long way.

I suck at group brainstorming. I feel like a caged cat and I start to shut down and look for excuses to leave. I form my best ideas in solitude and then like to bring them out in the open for collaborative polishing.

I get anxious with and frustrated by committees. I suck at joining.

Anything that has to do with pulling up the distant past — I’m no good at it. I loathe digging up old information, I dislike conversations that involve a lot of back tracking. I’m not even that good at reminiscing.

Whatever part of the brain controls the function of checking voicemail and going to the post office, well I have brain damage in that vicinity.

I’m a terrible co-pilot. I can’t read maps, I miss road signs and exits, I have no natural sense of where North is. It’s better for me to just drive, or be in charge of the tunes. And there are about nine hundred other things I suck at. Athletics, math, small talk…

The point of this exercise is to notice where you have tension around being lame at something. The things on your “I suck at…” list are the things that have bothered you frequently or deeply for a long time. You have fought against them, felt less than because of them, and tried to cover up for them.

When we put our weaknesses in plain language and clear view, we can see where we need to become more conscious, and how our so called “shortcomings” point to our true strengths.

So, what do you suck at?