5 Easy Ways to Discover Your Strengths
If you’re anything like my mid-career high-performing clients who are stagnating in your role, you’re probably feeling overwhelmed about where to start. The thought process for me went something like this, “But what’s next? I know it’s not this. But if not this, then what?! I don’t even know what I’m good at.”
In this post and video, I share 5 simple prompts to uncover your natural talents and the aspects of work that energize you so that you can jump-start your career change and/or… even make your current work way more engaging.
As a high-performer, it’s 100% normal to not know what you’re good at.
You're so close to your strengths and they're so embedded in who you are, your habits, your behavior. Your strengths come so naturally that it can be really hard to see them objectively. “If I'm good at it, then so is everyone else… And if everyone else is good at it, then it's not valuable… And if it's not valuable, then I'm not going to pay any attention to it.” Sound familiar?
Working within your areas of natural talent makes work fun.
But here’s the thing. Knowing your strengths is the key to feeling happy and engaged at work. Research shows that by getting to do what you do best for just a few more hours every day, you can:
→ Have more positive interactions with your coworkers
→ Be more creative and innovative
→ Get more done and be more productive
→ Perform at a higher level
5 prompts to get started in discovering your strengths.
1. What kinds of activities are you naturally drawn to?
What are the things you yearn to do? What activities energize you? What are the things in your current job or previous roles that you just couldn't help but do? Are there things that you find yourself working on when you know you should be doing that other thing? Yeah, pay attention to those!
2. What kinds of activities do you seem to pick up quickly?
What activities do you pick up quickly - like, super quickly? If that’s tough to pinpoint, come at it from another angle: what types of activities take you longer to master? What types of activities are even frustrating or drain you? Are there types of activities or situations where you see yourself learning rapidly?
3. What are you doing when you get “in the zone?”
What’s consuming your mind when you lose all sense of time, responsibilities, everything, and you’re “in the zone?” Can you think of times when you just seemed to automatically know the steps to be taken? Where you didn’t even have to think because you were almost working on autopilot? When have you felt in a state of flow?
According to the 8 Traits of Flow According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow describes “those moments when you’re completely absorbed in a challenging but doable task.” Flow is a cornerstone to finding work you’re excited about and thriving at work and in life. It was coined by one of the founders of positive psychology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who shares:
“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”
4. When have you thought, “Woah! How did I do that?!”
Think back and try to recall the times when your autopilot seemed to kick on and you took action without even thinking. You might have thought, “How did I even know to do that? Where did that knowledge come from?” During what types of activities do you seem to have these moments of subconscious excellence?
5. What are those things that give you that little extra kick?
When we accomplish a task, it’s normal to get a little jolt of dopamine. And it feels pretty dang good. But there are certain things that we do or accomplish that feel extra good. When you get done and think, “That was fun! When can I do it again? I want more!” When have you had moments of extremely high satisfaction?
Discovering your strengths is the key to standing out in a job search.
Not only does knowing and leveraging your strengths allow you to perform at a higher level with more ease and less stress, but it’s also one of the core elements that help high-performers to stand out as they make a career change and engage in a job search.
Knowing your natural talents - and working to refine them into true strengths - is what allows you to switch the narrative from, “What could I do next?” to “What do I want to do next?”
And that’s when you’re back in control of your career decisions. That’s when you’re proactively scanning and exploring from a place of who you are when you’re at your best and how you want to show up in the world - at work and in life.