Find your Natural Talents and see where you belong…

The best thing to do is to do the thing you’re best at.

But do you know what that is? And are you making choices that help you make the most of your true potential?

This is a story about a simple exercise I found incredibly helpful when I wasn’t sure what to do next. I’ve often given it to people while chatting and it’s been good for them too. It’s designed to help people improve their chances of success thanks to personal insights that make better choices more likely.

The idea came about when somebody noticed something wrong with the way companies tend to run their performance reviews. It goes a bit like this…

Brief pat on the back for the targets you’re hitting and the things going well. Then the rest of the time goes on the bits that aren’t going so great and how you can fix them. You leave with an action plan focused on learning and things you can do to improve.

The problem with this is that it points you in the wrong direction. It actively seeks out your greatest weaknesses in order to fix them. The result? You go off to put a whole bunch of effort into the things that you’re least skilled at doing.

Trying to do things you’re not really designed to do is tiring —the more effort you have to make (because it’s difficult for you) the faster your energy drains away. But if you’re doing things that come naturally to you, the opposite is true. Doing what you do charges you with energy and lifts you up. If it’s really natural to you, it will feel almost effortless. You feel like you’re flying.

So if you take a look in the other direction and actively seek out your greatest strengths, you’re going to be heading towards your best performance.

The challenge comes when you’re not really sure where your greatest strengths lie, and there’s a good reason why so few of us know what they truly are.

Our brains have lots of ‘blind spots’, and our greatest strengths hide out in one of these. Here’s how to look into that space and see what’s there.

Stage 1

Divide a sheet of A4 into three columns, headed Poor, Good and Excellent.

Spend some time thinking about what you’re Poor at, Good at and Excellent at. Write down everything you can think of from your whole life experience, including everything that’s potentially relevant in a working context.

Concentrate on skills or personal attributes that are valuable in hobbies, parenting, hosting or anything else where you’re being productive. These are all kinds of ‘work’.

This may take a bit more time than you think.

Once you’re satisfied you can’t think of anything else. It’s complete.

Ideally you’d do this before finding out about stage 2 because knowing the whole exercise at the start may affect your results. If you can’t resist the urge to read on now, it will still work I’m sure — just might not give you quite such a clear view.

Stage 2

Talk to a good friend, family member or colleague — it’s important that it should be someone who knows you really well. Show them your sheet and explain you’re assessing your talents.

In the margin of your sheet after the ‘excellent’ column, add another column.

Ask them if they can spot anything that’s missing. Something they know you do, but you’ve forgotten to include. If they think you’ve got it all covered, have a conversation about the things which are already there, focusing your attention on the ‘excellent’ column. If you come up with something extra, add it in the new fourth column on it’s own.

If nothing new comes up, underline any items in the ‘excellent’ column that are outstanding for how good you are at them.

Anything added or highlighted in this conversational session is likely to be a ‘natural talent’ (the heading of the fourth column).

Natural talents are the things which come so naturally to you, that you scarcely notice you’re doing them, and certainly don’t classify them as skills. That’s why you’re not really aware of them, which is why I called it a ‘blind spot’.

And yet, it’s precisely because you’re naturally gifted in this department, that when your work taps into these skills, you’ll be ‘in your flow’. The more time your work engages these skills, the more you’ll enjoy what you do, and the more effective and productive you’ll be.

For the record —I was given this exercise by Adrian Bourne (Building a Portfolio career) twenty years ago. For me, the blind spot was about talking to people — even as I write this it still doesn’t quite feel like a ‘skill’ — but it is.

I took it for granted that it’s easy to talk to anyone from anywhere, no matter what their background or what they’re interested in. That knowledge made a big difference to the choices I’ve made ever since. There’s another whole blog in that, so all I’ll say here is that I think my life has improved as a result.

Finally, and just to be clear. I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t try things because they’re difficult — of course it’s true that concentrating hard often leads to worthwhile breakthroughs and improvement. So this article is NOT telling you to abandon learning for improvement!! The point is simply this…

We all have to do things because we can, rather than because they’re good at them — that’s just part of life. But if you’re working against the grain, it may not be wise to insist on trying to fix things best left to others.

So find your natural talents. The more you can work in those zones, the closer to your full potential you will be.

If you try out the exercise, please do let me know. I’d love to know how useful it was and whether you have new insights you’d be happy to share.