Shine With Grace

Step back and watch yourself for a while.  Try an activity and see how quickly you pick it up, how quickly you skip steps in the learning and add twists and kinks you haven’t been taught yet.  See whether you become absorbed in the activity to such an extent that you lose track of time.  If none of these has happened after a couple of months, try another activity and watch  - and another.  Over time your dominant talents will reveal themselves, and you can start to refine them into a powerful strength.

~ extracted from “Now, Discover Your Strengths” by Marcus Buckingham & Donald O. Clifton

How to discover our talent, our bliss?  The quotation above offers a very practical guide.  In order to find out our strengths, we have to try out different things - and we just know it when it clicks. 

According to the book, talents are your naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior; while strength is the consistent near perfect performance in an activity.

We all have some different and particular talents.  As simple as telling a joke, some friends could just tell it with timing and flare and you wonder “How did he do that?” or “Where did this come from?”  And you know that it is more than learnt techniques.   

I think we are more initiative when we were still a child - we just knew what we liked and disliked; what we were good at and what we just couldn’t master; we would simply indulge ourselves in what we liked to to do.  This knowing, nevertheless, becomes blur when we grow up.   Education, expectations/opinions from others, social norm etc. all contribute to this loss of knowing.

So, if you are wondering what are your strengths and talents, try out different things until you find one that let you feel like being in the flow…

Once you found it, cultivate, develop and focus on it, because when you are at your best and doing what you enjoy, you gain the greatest room for growth and you explore your greatest potential -  this is true for Tiger Woods, Bill Gates, Richard Branson and this will be true for you too.

So, what about our weaknesses, should we work on our weaknesses?  Well, we are not going to ignore them.  But, it may not be necessary to make it perfect either.  One practical approach is to work around them.  We can improve it to a level that it won’t hinder us from developing our strength (damage control).  And, if appropriate, we can always delegate/outsource tasks that we are not particularly good at to free us space and time to groom our potential. 

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• A Strategy For Happiness and Efficiency
• My Basic Beliefs 

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