Can you name your five top strengths? How applicable are these strengths to your current position (or the job you are finding for)? Do they characterize a skill or strength?
For example:
- Are you listing your top drive in a programming language or an pathology technique? Those are skills; not strengths.
- Are you listing your top drive in broader terms that define the kind of work you accomplish best? For example, do any of these words characterize you? Achiever, Analytical, Consistency, Discipline, Includer, Maximizer, Strategic, Woo? If so, these are strengths!
Ah, that's the key. Skills fall under strengths. We all can teach each other skills. We can convention and excellent them if we have the desire to do so. The skills we excel at tend to use our strengths. For example, a great project manager will be someone that has a natural skill as an "Includer" and "Consistency" (as well as many others. The best project managers have great habitancy skills. This may consist of the ability to be an "Includer" to stretch the circle of the team to consist of habitancy (multiple business groups) and make them feel part of the project team. This may consist of the ability to treat habitancy the same ("Consistency"), no matter what the person's skill or hub in life.
What's moving is these two strengths, Includer and Consistency, can apply to business analysis, a journalist, or a party planner. What skills you learn that fall within the skills for your strengths indicate which occupation is right for you...and how good you will be at it. If you choose a job that doesn't play to your strengths or natural talents, chances are, your skills may be mediocre and your interest in your job minimal and your occupation success not that successful.
All this comes from a Wsj recommended book titled Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath. Gallup introduced an to help habitancy like you to find their strengths. Achiever, Analytical, Consistency, Discipline, Includer, Maximizer, Strategic, Woo are just a sampling of the 34 most tasteless natural ability strengths or "themes."
Why is this so important? Life is too short to be miserable for any length of time. You want to be beneficial and effective to your family, coworkers, and business. You want to be appreciated for your efforts. You are appreciated more if you find positions and fellowships that believe in your strengths.
This is a two-way street. If you are a manager, you want to help your team use its strengths. Some habitancy are detailed oriented and others big-pictured. Sure, each individual may be able to accomplish the other activity but why would you want to make things difficult? habitancy that works within their strengths are happier, motivated, and faultless associated tasks fast with great accuracy. Using one's natural strengths increases the desire to accomplish better. Why would you not want to align the task at hand with the someone with that strength? Why would you want to spend costly time fixing the employee's (or your) weaknesses! Play to your (or your staff's) strengths!
Think positive! Think Strengths! There is more inherent for growth when a someone invests vigor in developing his/her strengths instead of correcting one's deficiencies. You minimize the dissatisfaction one feels on a project. Concentrating on your weaknesses is like hitting your head against the wall. The pain stops when you stop! If you find opportunities to work using your strengths, you are move motivated.
We've all taken the corporate "opinion" survey. How do you rejoinder the age-old question, "At work, I have the chance to do what I do best every day." Ok, stop laughing. It's no laughing matter when you comprehend that habitancy that use their strengths daily are six times as likely to be engaged in their jobs and are more than three times as likely to narrative having an excellent ability of life in general.
Don't blame the corporation! Your occupation is in your hands! First, you need to know your strengths. That will help you focus on the right job. You can interview the fellowships to see if the business religious doctrine (and actions) appreciates the strengths you offer. You can tell if your manager will reserve your strengths or drill you on your weaknesses (and get out of Dodge Fast).
This isn't a magic bullet. Your character and personality as well as your learned behavior from your upbringing will sway your ability to adjust to using your strengths. Knowing your strengths is only a piece of the complex human puzzle. Yet, it is great to know and align your occupation to your strengths than get frustrated and a continual headache attempting to heighten your weaknesses.
What's in it for you?
Well, it is the New Year and a new decade. It's the time to think about what you categorically want to do with your life. Should you make a occupation convert or just convert positions or company? Do you need to convert at all? Are you focusing and wasting valuable time on tasks that don't correlate to your strengths? Maybe it's time to invest in someone (hire) that has the drive to do the task of a weaker drive for you?
My results confirmed that I'm in the right place, doing what I do best (funny, positivity was #5).
5. Positivity: Enthusiasm that is contagious. Upbeat and can get others excited about what they are going to do. I personally play to this drive as a writer, speaker and counselor to motivate others to take action.
4. Responsibility: proprietary of what they say they will do. Values consist of honesty and loyalty. I play to this drive in all my consulting assignments. Clients know that I will be true to the project; even if it means I need to cut myself. Clients need to only ask once. I'll tell them what I can do (even if it involves work done by others) and get it done.
3. Learner: Great desire to learn and want to continuously improve. Interested in the process of learning. Look at my book recommendations. The recommendations are in the area of business, not technology. I don't plan on changing careers to be a full-time marketer or sales person...but I do want to learn these skills.
2. Activiator: Makes things happen by turning thoughts into action. My sister gave me a great card of encouragement. It had a photo of someone on a motorcycle while holding a long pole with many separate animals on it. Covering saying: You have some crazy ideas. Inside saying: And you make them happen! Having this drive is the calculate why I was able to start complicated companies, learn speaker skills, and get this ezine out the virtual door every other month.
And my #1 Natural Strength...
1. Futuristic: Inspired by the future and what could be. Inspire others with their vision of the future. I all the time see inherent in everyone. I see inherent for a business as well. I can allege what I see to senior supervision and adjust the vision to what is achievable given the reality of the situation.
The full, theme for the aggregate of these five strengths was to be a strategic architect, entrepreneur, coach, and consultant. I was surprised by this yet pleased. These five strengths characterize how I am separate from so many others. That is why I am the best at what I do. That's my Purple Cow. It is what habitancy (and clients) notice, remark about, and spread the word to others.
Enough about me... What about you?
The only way to be "The Best" and be a "Purple Cow" among all the other candidates is to energize your strengths.
