Have you ever wondered why we do things we hate to do, aren't even good at and zap our energy? I mean we do them just in general. But I especially speaking about those who do them for work! 8, 9, 10, maybe even 11 or more hours per day, we sit, stand, direct, calculate, whatever it is, just to get a paycheck or just to feel halfway accomplished. Well, I know everyone has been asked this question before, but what if you really could and DID do what brought you at least a tolerable amount of joy?! See, the problem is not that we (as people) don't want to experience joy, it's that we don't even know how. If someone told you, " I want to give you the perfect job, the perfect life, something that you love to do every second you're doing it...now tell me exactly how to do it. What's the perfect job for you?" Would you be at a loss for words? Do YOU even know what you like to do?!?!?! - Therein lies the root of the problem. How are we going to seek what we love, when we ourselves don't even know our loves? Huh...how ya gonna do it?!?!
Yes- a long intro to my original intent for posting, but sometimes I just have to get the thoughts out.
So, I was praying (as we all should do) asking God to reveal what I like to do. I mean, I know what I like to do, but how could I ever make a living of it? What are my real talents? What are my strengths? Help me put everything together. I've heard that we should do what we love everyday to be most happy, but what the heck does it mean if I just want to sit and read magazines, learn random stuff, [insert what you love to do but doesn't pay the bills]. So what are my talents?!
While in Borders, I came across a book in the management section, NOW, DISCOVER YOUR STRENGTHS, by Marcus Buckingham & Donald Clifton, PhD. The premise of this book is: capitalizing on your talents brings success...personal, emotional, spiritual and financial. Our talents are what we should focus our lives around.
Again, we know this. The problem is often WHAT are our talents and HOW do we use them daily?
Yes- a long intro to my original intent for posting, but sometimes I just have to get the thoughts out.
So, I was praying (as we all should do) asking God to reveal what I like to do. I mean, I know what I like to do, but how could I ever make a living of it? What are my real talents? What are my strengths? Help me put everything together. I've heard that we should do what we love everyday to be most happy, but what the heck does it mean if I just want to sit and read magazines, learn random stuff, [insert what you love to do but doesn't pay the bills]. So what are my talents?!
While in Borders, I came across a book in the management section, NOW, DISCOVER YOUR STRENGTHS, by Marcus Buckingham & Donald Clifton, PhD. The premise of this book is: capitalizing on your talents brings success...personal, emotional, spiritual and financial. Our talents are what we should focus our lives around.
Again, we know this. The problem is often WHAT are our talents and HOW do we use them daily?
NOW, DISCOVER YOUR STRENGTHS gives you the insight to find your talents, so you can first discover what you brings you inherent joy, build our talents into strengths and focus our lives around them. (The book explains the difference between stenghts and talents.)
Here's an excerpt from Marcus Buckingham's bio:
In a world where efficiency and competency rule the workplace, where do personal strengths fit in?
It’s a complex question, one that intrigued Cambridge-educated Marcus Buckingham so greatly, he set out to answer it by challenging years of social theory and utilizing his nearly two decades of research experience as a Sr. Researcher at The Gallup Organization to break through the preconceptions about achievement and get to the core of what drives success.
The result of his persistence, and arguably the definitive answer to the strengths question, can be found in Buckingham’s trio of best-selling books, First, Break All the Rules (coauthored with Curt Coffman, Simon & Schuster, 1999); Now, Discover Your Strengths (coauthored with Donald O. Clifton, The Free Press, 2001); and The One Thing You Need to Know (The Free Press, 2005), in which the author gives important insights to maximizing strengths, understanding the crucial differences between leadership and management, and fulfilling the quest for long-lasting personal success.
What would happen if men and women spent more than 75% of each day on the job using their strongest skills and engaged in their favorite tasks, basically doing exactly what they wanted to do?
AND...
A piece of the book's intro:
"The simplest explanation is that most organizations' basic assumptions about people are wrong...Most organizations are built on two flawed assumptions about people:
1. Each person can learn to be competent in almost anything.
2. Each person's greatest room for growth is in his or her areas of weakness.
Presented so baldly, these two assumptions seem too simplistic to be commonly held, so let's play them out and see where they lead....
- Your organization spends more money on training people once they are hired than on selecting them properly in the first place.
- Your organizations spends most of its training and money on trying to plug the gaps in employees' skill or competencies. It calls these gaps "areas of opportunity." Your individual development plan, if you have one, is built around your "areas of opportunity" or weaknesses.
...As long as an organization operates under these assumptions, it will never capitalize on the strengths of each employee....These are the two assumptions that guide the world's best managers:
1. Each person's talents are enduring and unique.
2. Each person's greatest room for growth is inthe areas of his or her greatest strength.
...However, we don't start there. We start with you. What are your strengths? How can you capitalize on them? What are your most powerful combinations? Where do they take you? What one, two or three thinkgs can you do better than ten thousand other people?
GET THIS BOOK! NOW, DISCOVER YOUR STRENGTHS
