5 Subtle Signs You’re Smarter Than You Think

Some forms of smartness are highly recognized and rewarded, like the speed of thinking and social charisma. However, other types of smartness (skills, self-knowledge, wisdom) are just as important, but people overlook them. If you have these forms of smarts, you may not have even noticed them.

Are you smart in these critical ways?

1. You know what your self-sabotaging patterns are.

We don’t tend to self-sabotage in new ways, we self-sabotage in the same ways over and over again.

Example: You avoid decisions or tasks that make you feel anxious or overwhelmed, even though this has cost you.

People often criticize themselves for self-sabotaging, but if you’re aware of what your patterns are, you’re a step ahead of the general populace. This is especially true if you can recognize a similar pattern occurring across different contexts (such as at work and in your personal life) and times (in the recent and distant past).

Recognizing your patterns is the first step in improving them, but huge swaths of people never get this far. If you can see your patterns, that’s a strength.

To level up your capacity to recognize abstract patterns of self-sabotage, check out this post with 30 examples of self-sabotage.

2. You’re able to maintain and repair relationships.

Humans succeed through relationships. Our bonds with other people help us achieve and support our well-being. This is true at the species level (we do better as a species through working together) and at the individual level (people who are adept at relationships succeed more).

However, a lot of focus is on people’s ability to form relationships. Maintaining and repairing relationships is an underrated skill, but it’s at least as important.

Example: A friend had ignored my last two texts. Out of the blue she messaged me and texted: “Sorry, I didn’t reply. I’ve been going through some health issues. We’re going to… (an event we usually go to together). Hope to see you there. Hope all is good with you!” This was a simple action that repaired our relationship.

What relationship could you repair or maintain through a simple action? Even people who have this strength (they know what to do) sometimes underuse it.

3. You can quickly utilize feedback.

When I was training as a clinical psychologist, my classmates and I were understandably nervous about failing our exams. A supervisor told me something immensely reassuring that has still stuck with me over 15 years later. She said: “We don’t worry about students who can take feedback.” They wanted to make sure that, when a student was advised to make an adjustment to their therapeutic style, they:

• would understand it and wouldn’t be defensive
• could quickly adjust their behavior

These are two slightly different skills. One is understanding the rationale, and one is seeing opportunities to use the advice and execute.

Instead of focusing on being perfect, think about how you can nimbly incorporate feedback. I mean feedback broadly, both formal feedback and your observations of what works for you in your personal and work life, and what doesn’t. Your results are a form of feedback, too.

4. You’re observant.

This doesn’t sound like a hugely exciting strength but it’s massively important.

Scientific discoveries start with observation. You might have heard famous stories of this—how penicillin was discovered by accident. More broadly, all science starts with observation. Scientists observe something they decide they want to test through research.

In day-to-day life, observation is an important skill for all sorts of reasons, including seeing opportunities, gathering self-knowledge, and maintaining relationships.

Examples: You observe a strategy that’s working for someone else and you put your own spin on it to use it yourself. Or, you notice what types of compliments someone responds to. Or, you notice patterns in what makes a problem you’re having better and worse.

5. You can see how general advice applies to you.

Knowledge transfer is a skill I’ve already touched on, but I’ll call it out specifically.

When you read advice (like the posts here at PT), does it ever feel like that advice has come at exactly the right time for you, or was written specifically for you? If you ever have these experiences then you probably have a strength in knowledge transfer. You can read general examples and see how they apply to you.

It should be obvious how this skill is important for learning and improving. However, if you naturally have this capacity and or you’ve honed it over the years, you might not even recognize that it’s a strength that not everyone shares.

Which of the five strengths I’ve outlined have you been overlooking? Now that you see how important that strength is, how can you use it more? How can you flex the strength you already have, in more ways that will benefit you? Consider how you can enhance your happiness and well-being, as well as getting ahead in your life and career, and managing your relationships.