Do you focus on your strengths or your weaknesses?
What are your natural talents?
Many of us lean towards our weaknesses – they are essential to know but to achieve your best life lean into your innate strengths. In fact, Gallup research suggests that when using their strengths daily, people are three times as likely to report having an excellent quality of life.
A weakness is something that inhibits you from achieving success so we need to be aware of our weaknesses, but when moving towards transformation and lasting change, work on developing the strengths you already have.
What is the difference between talents and strengths?
A talent is a naturally recurring pattern of thought, feeling or behaviour that can be productively applied. Strength is the ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance in a specific task. For a talent to become strength it has to be intentionally used and developed.
Your natural talents together with the time spent on practising and developing your skills and expanding your knowledge base (investment in strengths) all contribute to building your strengths. However, out of all the main factors in developing strength – skill, knowledge and talent, the most significant one is your talent. This is because your talents are inherent and can’t be acquired unlike skills and knowledge.
For example, as a sales person you can learn everything about your product (knowledge), you can be trained to use certain sales techniques (a skill), and you can practise making a sale (investment). However, the innate tendency to push a customer to commit at exactly the right moment, in exactly the right way must be naturally occurring and cannot be learned.
The key to building a fully developed strength is to identify your most dominant talents, which are likely found within your top five CliftonStrengths themes, then complement them with acquired knowledge, skills and investment.
Your talent DNA
Currently, the term snowflake has taken on a different connotation but traditionally, it has always been a term of strength and uniqueness as no two snowflakes are the same.
And that is us, how wonderful that as humans we may have similarities and our vibes attract our tribes but YOU, YOUR STRENGTHS, YOUR TALENT DNA are uniquely you and only you. And they can be used to achieve whatever you set your mind to.
Why are we not using our strengths and being our best selves?
Firstly we often don’t know what our strengths are! And then it’s LIFE! Yes, LIFE gets in the way.
It throws us curveballs, makes us doubt ourselves.
So, how do you know what your strengths are?
You can start by asking yourself these 5 questions:
Gallup 5 Clues to Talent
- To what kinds of activities are you naturally drawn?
- What kinds of activities do you seem to pick up quickly?
- In what activities did you seem to automatically know the steps to be taken?
- During what activities have you had moments of subconscious excellence when you thought, “How did I do that?”
- What activities give you a kick, either while doing them or immediately after finishing them, and you think, “When can I do that again?”
If you want to go deeper, you can also complete an online Gallup CliftonStrenghts assessment to discover your top 5 or full talent profile. More information can be found here.
By discovering your strengths you’ll be a step closer towards a transformational change in your life.
And remember, you don’t need to do it alone; greatness and transformation come from having a team. Consider having a coach who can empower, challenge and help you take action.
Now is the time to discover who you really are. Tap into your strengths and live your best life!
