TIP 54
DISCOVER YOUR UNIQUE TALENT
There are two kinds of talent, man-made talent and God-given talent. With man-made talent you have to work very hard. With God-given talent, you just touch it up once in a while.
We all have some special talent, skill, or gift—something we do or some way we see things that is different or better than anyone else. Very often, what comes naturally to you is so much a part of you that you don’t even notice it. People tend to think that if it is easy for them, then it is easy for everyone else, too. This just isn’t so. You might think that if it is this easy or fun, then you shouldn’t get paid for it. We like to think that work is hard—that if we don’t sweat and struggle, we don’t deserve to get paid for it. Again, this just isn’t so. In fact, it is more often the opposite: the people who make the most money love what they do and have some natural ability for it that they have honed and developed.
If you can’t figure out what your special talent is, interview your friends, family, and colleagues. They will tell you. It really is this easy.
Here are some questions you can ask them:
1. What do you think is my greatest strength?
2. What is my biggest weakness? (Ask this only if you feel up to it, and ask them to tell you in a constructive way. Do not comment on anything they say, just write it down. You are simply gathering opinions.)
3. What do you see as my special talent or gift? What do I do naturally and effortlessly that is special?
4. If I were on the cover of a magazine, what magazine would it be and what would the story be about?
5. When am I most fully expressing this gift or talent?
The next step is to begin to honor your gift. By this, I mean that you fully express it, share it with others, do it, be it, and live it. Remember, your own special skill comes so easily and naturally that you probably take it for granted.
Steve hired me because he wanted to make more money. He was in a banking career working as a benefits administrator, and although he didn’t mind the work, he was frustrated with the low pay. I gave Steve the homework of finding out his special talent. Steve typed the questions listed previously, handed them out to friends and colleagues, and came back with surprising results. Steve’s greatest strength was his personality. Across the board people loved his warmth, sense of humor, and ability to get along with everybody. Yes, he could solve problems and was analytical, but that wasn’t his special talent. As for the magazines, Golf, Golf Digest, and Sports Illustrated were the winners, and the best story was about how Steve used golf to quickly move up the corporate ladder.
We started to make this fiction a reality. What if we could leverage Steve’s personality on the golf course while courting clients? He’d be in seventh heaven. Steve talked to his manager about learning the sales end of the job. Then, Steve volunteered to organize a golf outing for senior management and the top clients. He started looking at every way that he could to honor his gift for people and his love of golf. His manager soon put him in charge of a big account and started training Steve to make the transfer to sales with a salary increase in six months. Not only is he happier at work, but he is in a job with much higher income potential.
If you are drawing a blank with the simple interview questions above and it still isn’t clear what your unique talent is or, if you prefer to have an objective assessment of your abilities, we use a very sophisticated computerized assessment in the Career Change Kit to help our clients identify their hard-wired abilities (see Appendix D for more information). Our brain develops patterns that cement by the age of 14 and, although we can develop new neural pathways, scientists estimate that it takes approximately 10,000 hours to create one—about 5 years of effort. This means that we are more hard-wired than we might think, and it indicates that time spent developing weaknesses is a poor use of your company’s resources. It is far better to identify your natural abilities and then spend time and money enhancing those than trying to improve your weak areas.
After coaching thousands of different people, I can safely say that people who do work in alignment with their natural talents and their core values are very happy, more likely to be financially successful than those who are unhappy, and they feel personally rewarded and deeply fulfilled. It is well worth spending the time to identify your unique talents and abilities and, once you do, start expressing them in your life. Just start. Do one thing that will allow you to fully express your unique gift. Then see how you can incorporate that into your life today, and the universe will pull you in that direction.