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How to find your true genius

 

 Happy Monday

This week I want to talk about working from your strengths. 

Working from your strengths is a wonderful way to work, and I am a big fan of knowing your strengths and then sculpting your work life to fit. 

So, what is a strength? 

You can think of a strength as a place where your natural talents and abilities intersect with your expertise, your interests and just the right conditions. 

This week I had a wonderful week working on a course called, "Building a High-Trust Workplace." I was revising this course and truly in the zone! This work is right in my sweet spot!

For starters, it is something that I'm deeply interested in. Personally, know what it feels like to work in a high trust environment and in a low trust environment and I prefer the former quite a bit!

I know what is possible in a high trust environment from personal experience and from a lot of study, and I also have a personal fascination and lifelong interest in personal development, neuroscience and emotional intelligence, and all of those things are in this course.

I got to spend the whole week in the zone, working with material that I personally find most interesting. 

Also, I have a fair bit of experience and expertise in this, and I was doing the curriculum design which is something that I love to do. Designing curriculum allows me to put patterns together and utilize the research I've done and it just energizes me.

The conditions were just right too. I got to collaborate with a partner, and I got to work in my pajamas a little bit, and I got to do all the things but I love most about my work. 

And, I got to do one other thing which is really important to me, and that is to build a course that can really help people and that I believe is going to be a breakthrough experience for the participants. 

In this way, I feel like I'm helping them be a better version of themselves and that is another thing that is deeply aligned with my belief system. So, all of the conditions were present this week for me to be working from my strengths. 

It was awesome!

But, some leaders hesitate to create a strengths-based environment. 

I talk to a lot of leaders and sometimes there is a little bit of resistance because some leaders have this experience where an employee comes to them and says, "don't give me that job because that's not that's not one of my strengths."

So sometimes people can use the idea of working from your strengths as an excuse to not do something, and that's the down-side.  

But, there are a lot of ways to overcome that so we can talk about that in another video. 

The bottom line is that when someone is really working from their strengths, there is a deep sense of meaning and fulfillment, and there is a feeling of deep alignment so the work is much better and the person's sense of satisfaction is greater, and their engagement is much better, and the product is much better!

There are so many good things about working in alignment with your strengths!

I highly highly recommended that you explore this further.

But, you might be asking yourself, "how do I know my strengths?"

For starters, you can do an assessment like the StrengthsFinder (TM).

It is a wonderful assessment and I've learned so much from it over the years,  but there are other ways that you can approach this as well. 

You can The Motivators Assessment (TM), or the Myers-Briggs(R), or True Colors (TM) or the Enneagram, or the DiSC Work Style Assessment (R). 

Any of these (or others) will give you some insight into your own patterns and that's the place to start. 

Self-discovery.

Sidebar: if you don't want to take any of those assessments or even if you already have, I actually have a little worksheet of questions that I sometimes pose to people to get the process started. I'd be happy to send you that set of questions. Just send me an email or direct message me or whatever, and I'll send it to you.

So, once you know more about your strengths, I want you to think about sculpting your job one day at a time, or one project at a time to find greater and greater alignment.

This is a lifelong commitment!

I want you to be working at the top of your game, but not every day is going to be like that. Some days are better than others. Some days you just have to just grind through, and being a career professional is all about trying new things and pushing your edges and learning new stuff, so each day is different.

But, if you can really discern what it means to work at your best and what kind of projects you love, and how your brain works, and how you can put that into practice and deliver for people using all of that, then that's where you get the biggest bang for the buck!

So, take this as your weekly encouragement!

I hope you will go and do a little bit of self-discovery and figure out what your sweet spot is and then try to sculpt your job a little bit to bring that to life!

Until next week… have a good one!

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