Do you Know your Hard-wired, Natural Talents?
To kick off the process of creating your personal life vision, it’s important to be self-aware and start at the core of who you are. The first step to understanding yourself is to look at your natural talents and abilities. Knowing your strengths and abilities and finding the type of work that best fits your natural tendencies will help you have a fulfilling and satisfying career and life.
What are Natural Abilities?
Natural abilities stabilize early in life and remain stable over time. They take less time, effort, and energy and don’t decline with disuse. You don’t have to practice or use them regularly to maintain them. If you can tap into these innate abilities, you will be swimming with the current throughout your life while others struggle in mismatched positions against the tide. Your goals, fulfillment, and happiness will come more easily to you once you identify what these are.
It’s important to distinguish between natural talents and skills and education, as they are often confused. Skills are what we learn to do; they are function-driven tasks one has to master. They develop through study, education, application, and practice, and they decline with disuse. Highly motivated and intelligent people can accomplish many things that they have little to no talent for. However, they may not be satisfied doing it in the long-term.
The most powerful and influential talents are considered to be ‘driving abilities.’ These are important to note because they need to be expressed and fulfilled in some way in your life. These abilities often drive you into certain kinds of activities and, if they are not expressed, can lead to frustration. For example, someone who is musically gifted has a need to express themselves musically and creatively. Someone who is good at visualizing three-dimensional objects may enjoy engineering or architecture more than other careers. There are interactions between each person’s driving abilities that make them unique.
Examples of Driving Abilities
Diagnostic thinking: An aptitude for recognizing a common relationship among seemingly discrete or unrelated notions or ideas. Strong diagnostic thinkers typically perform well on rapidly identifying solutions or understanding complex problems. They will do well in medical, legal, or various consulting fields.
Idea productivity: The rate at which a person develops ideas. People with strong idea productivity are able to rapidly-produce a large number of ideas and information in an instant. They will do well in fields such as advertising, marketing and writing, sales, and communication.
Spatial-relation visualization: The ability to perceive objects in three dimensions. People with strong spatial-relation visualization need a connection to the hands-on or concrete world. They would do well in mechanical, dental, scientific, engineering, architectural, and artistic roles.
How to Best Leverage our Abilities (Whether You Have a Job or Not).
Many of these natural abilities demand to be used. The more we use our talents and abilities, the more satisfied and fulfilled we will be. The more we steer away from expressing our abilities, the more we’ll find frustration, boredom, or even stress.
So, once we find this out through the self-discovery process and coaching, how do we leverage our abilities? Knowing your talents will help you better manage how you work and what you decide to work on. There is more than one way to do a job or accomplish a task, and performing in a way that works with your abilities will create more efficiency and productivity.
For those who are just starting out their career or going through a career transition, this is a crucial step that many skip over. Reach out to me for a free 30-minute consultation on how I can help you get on the right path. And stay tuned for next week’s topic: PERSONAL STYLE