Life Satisfaction Discover Your Talents and Strengths
Life Satisfaction
The business of locating one’s key talent is based largely on evidence and to a lesser extent, the inner voice. If people keep telling you that you have a gift perhaps it would behoove you to listen.
The evidence may be in the assessments and test scores or the absence of difficulty while executing the project.
When I was younger people would tell me that because I was tall for my age and could shoot a basketball that I should become a basketball player…completely overlooking the fact that I had little talent for it…I was very good at some aspects of playing basketball but I was below average as a whole.
So, in this case I cannot take this to mean that based on the opinions of others I have a talent…they “saw” me, which is not the same a claiming to “know” me.
The opposite is when, as a child I developed a knack for memorization and I had a better than average voice and it became clear that I would be chosen frequently to read aloud in class. I knew how to read a sentence ahead as I was speaking the previous sentence and the result was a mistake free reading.The fact that I spent hours everyday adding to my vocabulary also helped but I needed to have the foundation to build on. The memory I possessed was helpful when we had to discuss the reading afterward.
My experience tells me that for every time I wanted to be a cowboy or a baseball player I had to bring it back to basics and see what the facts are:
Do I get unsolicited compliments based on specific examples? Do I manage to breeze through projects painlessly? Do people as me to mentor them or assist them? Do people benefit from my presence? Are people harmed by my absence when they are used to my participation yet they can’t seem to fill my shoes easily? These questions can serve as a beginning step to find out what is guiding us and how we might do well to investigate the future with the goal of pursuing a more in depth look at our path.
Key talents and strengths are a reality and it is how the world sees us, not what we “dream” that matters. We can and will find obstacles in our way at times but we can traverse them by building a solid foundation.
These are important things to settle early on so that we might get headed in the right direction and perhaps get training or do college coursework and refine our talents.
Some people are blessed with multiple talents and they choose to just skim the top layer of their competencies rather than stay rooted in any one given area but eventually they cultivate their talents by challenging themselves. The most valuable people at any company or institute of higher learning are specialists and they are correct in honing their talents rather than being a “jack of all trades, master of none” I think there is a delicate balance and we must ultimately see how our niche best serves our company or the job market. Life Satisfaction Discover Your Talents and Strengths written by Ken Bownes
