Chapter 15
Identifying Your WHAT
Step One
Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life: think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success. That is the way great spiritual giants are produced.
—Swami Vivekananda
In Chapter 14, you learned about the importance of your WHAT and were provided some initial suggestions for identifying it. This chapter continues the exploration in more depth, offering a multistep, proven process for revealing this vital aspect of who you are.
As explained in the Introduction, the equation for defining your WHAT comprises three interdependent elements.
For maximum results, each must work as a cohesive unit within an autonomous, clearly defined structure. Consider the diagram shown in Figure 15.1.
Figure 15.1 Live Within the Overlap of the Concentric Circles
Like a tripod, each component is reliant upon the other to maintain stability and maximize the full potential of the Venn diagram. While the equation can temporarily survive without all three elements being present, eventually, performance will suffer as one or more vital pieces are removed.
For example, imagine you landed a position that involves something you're good at and you receive fair compensation to complete the assigned tasks, but it's not something you love to do. You'll always have one foot out the door as you search for a more fulfilling career.
As another example, perhaps there's something you're really good at and you love doing it, but you can't find anyone to pay you for it. This is a common situation for those in the arts, which is why you'll often hear the phrase “starving artist.”
Landing a dream job that allows you to live within the overlap of the concentric circles is rare. Survey the people you know and ask them if their career meets all three criteria. Few will say yes. But it's an essential goal of this book—to help you cultivate a career built around what you love to do, what you're good at, and what someone will pay you to do.
Regarding the latter, it's preferred if you're paid a lot. If you're constantly worried about making next month's mortgage payment or putting food on the table, it's difficult to effectively share your Gifts with the world. I believe you should be paid extraordinarily well for what you're naturally wired to do.
That said, you must be willing to serve without expectation for financial reward.
While counterintuitive, achieving success boils down to helping others get what they want out of life. Leveraging how your DNA is naturally wired to excel is the most efficient path for doing so. As Zig Ziglar said,
“You can have anything you want in life if you help enough people get what they want.”
Accomplishing this requires a phenomenal understanding of self—which is what we'll be tackling in this chapter.
Let's get started with Step One of the WHAT equation—identifying your God-given Gifts.
Step One: Things You Love to Do
Discovering your WHAT starts with identifying your inherent Gifts. This is achieved through a three-step process.
To begin, find a quiet place where you can think. No TV. No radio. No iPod. No kids. Just you, alone with your thoughts.
If this feels uncomfortable, that could be part of the problem. It's hard to connect with your inner self when you're continually distracted by background noise. So turn away from the distractions and focus on what's most important: the real you.
Once you're in a place of silence, think about all the things you love doing. Whatever they are, write them down in a notebook, on your laptop, or use the blank lines coming up in this section. Don't worry about anyone else reading your list; it's for you alone.
For example, it's likely you enjoy that special time with someone you care about. If so, write it down. Maybe you love participating in sports and playing with your kids. If so, mark those down.
Think back. What did you enjoy as a teenager? Even if you haven't done something for years, if it would still bring you pleasure, write it down.
Focus on the activities and interactions that lift your soul. Avoid listing skills you're good at simply because you've practiced them over time (e.g., washing dishes).
Dig even deeper. When you were a child, were you drawn to a certain cartoon or a certain book? What was your favorite toy? Think back to a time when you laughed hysterically—what triggered the laughter?
What's your earliest memory? Why do you think it's stuck with you when so many other memories have faded away?
As an adult, what gives you goosebumps? For me, it's witnessing someone's soul reignite. There's a specific moment in my workshop when all the elements of this process click together and you can see a person's true self reemerge. It's as if something immensely precious had been buried under years of pain, chaos, or denial. Then the key to the treasure chest is turned; when the cover is opened, you're almost blinded by the glow.
Maybe you get goosebumps when you hear a powerful singer belt out an incredible rendition of a song. Maybe it's when you pick up your child at school and his eyes light up with unbridled joy when he sees you. Perhaps it's when you come up with a really good idea and you know you've found the solution you'd been looking for. Tie these moments to descriptions that encapsulate the activity in noun or adjective form—such as singing, listening to music, teaching, healing, entertaining.
When recalling a special moment, try not to be too literal; look for the subtext. For example, imagine you have a fond memory of an evening spent bowling with your grandmother. Instead of writing “bowling with Grammy” on your list, broaden it to “investing time with a beloved family member.”
As another example, say you closed a huge deal last year and felt really good about it. The monetary rewards are the tangibles, but what matters for this exercise is the sense of accomplishment you felt and how it enhanced your self-worth. This might be summed up as “closing a big deal.”
Next, think about your character traits. Are you bold, fearless, adventurous, funny, and/or entertaining? Perhaps you're creative, intuitive, an organizer extraordinaire, and/or have a strong ear for music?
Think about how these traits are expressed through your interactions and activities. For example, if you have a strong ear for music, one of the things you probably love doing is listening to music or playing an instrument. If you're an organizer extraordinaire, maybe you love arranging people's schedules or homes.
Write down everything you love doing on the lines below:
Things I Love Doing
Look at your list. Did you miss something? Were you in denial about anything? Try to add more items to the list. This is your life—take inventory and be completely honest.
If compiling this list takes a day to complete, that's fine. If it takes a week, even better. Whenever your list includes everything you feel it should, return here to complete this exercise.
The next step is to put the activities you've identified in order of preference. My list looked like this:
This is what I mean about being honest. You're reading a book I wrote, and I'm listing writing as being way down at #24. Writing is something I love doing, but it doesn't come easily to me. That said, I couldn't be more fired up about the ideas I'm expressing, partly because they involve list items #3, #6, #7, #8, #9, #13, #17, #19 and #23.
I therefore hired Hy Bender, a phenomenal editor who's exceptional at creating great books, to go over my manuscript and make it as concise, clear, and reader-friendly as possible. (You can learn more about Hy at www.BookProposal.net.)
I want you to be just as brutally honest, because actively seeking and accepting the truth is critical if you're going to find your WHAT. You might be hesitant about admitting that you love to do something because you feel others won't approve. But if it's moral and legal, then why care what others think? Stop trying to impress people you don't really like.
Quit getting along and start making others wrong.
Go back to your list. What didn't you write down that you know needs to be there? Return to your quiet place and dig really deep.
If you've been thoroughly honest with yourself, your God-given Gifts now appear somewhere on your list. When you're ready, please order your list by preference:
Things I Love Doing, in Order of Preference
Step Two: Things You Hate to Do
The next step in the process of identifying your inherent Gifts requires you to be totally honest about all the things you hate to do. If you're clear about what activities you despise, you can establish a strong foundation for moving your life forward by starting to let them go.
For example, maybe you abhor filing. You consider it mindless, time-consuming, unfulfilling work; and you always end up with a paper cut. Standing in front of a file cabinet with a 12-inch stack of pages to put away using some arcane system makes you want to light a match and set them on fire.
Whatever it is that pushes your buttons, write them down in a notebook, on your laptop, or use the blank lines coming up in this section.
Also, reflect on why you deplore an activity. Did you see or experience something that traumatized you as a child or that you were teased about as a teenager? Did you do something when you were younger that so upset you—for example, working at your family's slaughterhouse—that you swore to never do it again? And are you doing something similar now regardless?
What regular occurrences in your life make your blood curdle? Do you tell your boss how great he is, even though you'd like to kick him down a flight of stairs? Are you “friends” with the couple two houses down who you can't stand simply because you don't want to have an unharmonious relationship with neighbors?
Whatever it is that eats at you, write it down. Even if you worry others might see it as petty, include it. This exercise takes place without judgment. The key is to acknowledge your thoughts and feelings.
Again, tie these moments to descriptions that encapsulate the activity in noun or adjective form—for example, cleaning, watching TV, eating unhealthy food, being around miserable people, shopping. When you're ready, please create your list:
Things I Hate Doing
You may be amazed at how freeing it is to get all this down on paper. Activities you perform regularly that you've never admitted deeply bother you will jump out and shout at you.
Get it all out. Don't hold anything back. As with Step One, take as much time as you need, whether it's a day or a week. What matters is writing it all down.
The next step is to put the activities you've identified in order, from most to least distasteful. My list looked like this:
When you're ready, please order your list from most to least distasteful:
Things I Hate Doing, in Order of Distaste
Now that you've got your annoyances down on paper, take a closer look. Do all of the items ring true? Did you miss anything? Were you being completely honest?
U.S. Senate Chaplain Peter Marshall opened a prayer session in 1947 by noting, “Unless we stand for something, we shall fall for anything.” What you wrote down are the things you shouldn't tolerate, but you probably “fall” for most of them.
Think about how you spend a typical day, and figure out how much time is devoted to these activities you despise.
Now understand that you have to stop doing most of these things—because life is too short, and they're slowly killing you.
Every minute you engage in an activity you abhor reduces your life expectancy by an equal amount of time.
You're probably getting paid for doing a lot of these things. Comedian Drew Carey once said, “I belong to a therapy group for people who hate their jobs. It's called everybody. And it meets in a bar.” But whatever money you're making probably isn't worth the cost to your happiness, health, and sense of identity.
Of course, letting go of these drags on your life can take time, especially if the apparent alternatives are even worse.
Short term, try to establish a frame of mind that lets you do these things with minimal discomfort.
Long term, however, you should strive for creative solutions that let you drop these activities for good.
Another thing to consider is how you've put up with these self-destructive activities for so long. Your inner self must have been crying out to you to stop, and you responded by slapping a muzzle on it. When you tell your deepest self to shut up and find ways to rationalize your behavior, you risk committing great harm not only to yourself, but to others.
After all, isn't this how evil in the world takes place? People shut themselves off to what they know in their souls is right and make up excuses to perform acts that horrify them on some level. The more they do it, the bigger the excuses they create so they can live with the lies. This is why it's imperative to listen to your gut.
When something shakes you to your core and your inner voice screams at you to stop, pay attention. This is your soul sending a direct message.
You might think of your rationalizing brain as your Devil (I call this the Voice of Conjecture) and your soul as your Angel. Whether or not you listen to your soul will determine the quality of your existence.
The list you just created came from your inner Angel. Heed it.
Step Three: The Seven Seeds of Your Soul
This section is where your previous work pays off in helping to identify your inherent Gifts. Please grab your notebook, laptop, or dog-ear the pages that contain your final lists of Things I Love Doing and Things I Hate Doing, as you'll be referring to them frequently during this exercise.
Let's start with the top item on your list of Things I Love Doing. Read it to yourself a couple of times so you can really feel the words.
Next, ask yourself each of the six questions below as it relates to the activity. Each answer should be a definitive yes or no. Trust yourself and don't second-guess. Your first answer will almost always be right:
People often have difficulty answering yes or no to Questions #4 and #6. For Question #4, keep in mind that while you might not yet be a master of this activity, if you feel passionately about it and/or spend a lot of time engaging in it, you may have been given a special Gift to do it. In such cases your answer to Question #4 is likely to be yes, but you must be brutally honest.
For example, perhaps you identified traveling as one of the things you love doing. Although everyone has the ability to travel, only a small percentage enjoys spending most of their time on the road or in the air. If getting paid to see the world lights your fire, then your answer for this activity is yes; otherwise, it's no.
For Question #6, answer whether you can possibly make money performing the activity, not whether you're currently doing so. If you have a genuine Gift, you can monetize virtually any hobby, interest, or endeavor and, therefore, your answer would be yes. If you disagree with this statement, please email me at [email protected] and I'll teach you how to make money doing what you love to do.
If any of your answers to these first six questions is no, cross out the activity and move to the next item on your list of Things I Love Doing. Again, read the activity to yourself a couple of times and then run it through the six questions.
Continue this process until you reach an activity that results in a yes to all six questions. When you arrive at such an item, circle it, and then ask yourself this final question:
Does performing this activity involve anything on my list of Things I Hate Doing?
To help make this clearer, let me walk you through what my process looked like. As you may recall, the top item on my list of Things I Love Doing was
Having special time with my wife.
My answers to the first six questions were as follows:
It would be nice to think that I've been given a special Gift and could make money at it, but total honesty is required. Therefore, I had to go to the next item on my Things I Love Doing list, which is
Investing time with those I love.
Again, I couldn't answer yes to all six questions, so I proceeded to the next item on my list:
Teaching others how to discover their WHAT.
For this activity, my answers to the first six questions were as follows:
A clean sweep! All of those yes answers meant I could circle it and go on to the final question:
For each item on my Hate list, I read my beloved activity out loud first (as shown by the first two examples below) and then matched it against the despised activity. Here were my answers:
For the beloved activity to pass the criteria of The Seven Seeds of Your Soul, it has to match no more than two of your hated activities. If you answer yes three or more times, cross off the activity, and continue the process with the next item on your Things I Love Doing list.
If you answer yes less than three times, however, double circle the activity because you'll be returning to it. Meanwhile, continue the process by moving to the next item on your Things I Love Doing list.
You may wonder why I'm not insisting on a clean sweep of no's for the Things I Hate Doing list. The fact is virtually any activity you engage in will include aspects you dislike. That's just reality. But the discomfort level has to be low enough to be tolerable. By my being able to answer yes to the first six questions, and by answering yes no more than twice to the seventh question, I concluded that activity #3 on my list—Teaching others how to identify their WHAT—satisfied the criteria of The Seven Seeds.
I then went on to review the 26 remaining items on my Things I Love Doing list to see if any other activity met the criteria. Only two others did: #6, Speaking to groups and businesses about how to NICHETIZE and #7, Inspiring others to reinvent their lives and/or companies.
This exercise may be time-consuming if you've created an extremely long list (in which case, kudos for enjoying so many things), but it's well worth the investment. It's possible that your inherent Gifts won't appear in the first half or even the first two-thirds of your list, so be patient and work through every item.
Bottom line: These are the first steps of the most important process in this entire book. Don't rush it. And no matter how long it takes, see it through to completion. Your life is at stake, and the rewards are incalculable.
Time to get to it!
Follow the steps described, and write the activities that you double circled here:
If after going through the entire process you've been unable to identify any activity that satisfies The Seven Seeds of Your Soul, please return to the beginning of this chapter and start again…in a very quiet place, taking all the time you need. Your Gifts are there for you to discover. Commit to this exercise and you'll find them.
Conversely, if you came up with more than three results, the chances are you weren't sufficiently honest during the process—for example, you may have created too short a list of things you hate to do. In this case, please return to the start of this chapter and try again.
Eliminating items from your list is not always easy. Being bold and taking risks are two items that personify who I am (my DJ name was Mr. Bold), and it pained me that they didn't qualify. But the reality is I haven't been given a special Gift to be bold or take risks. Anyone can engage in these activities; and many do.
Once you've identified three or fewer activities, the last step is to choose the specific nouns or adjectives that best define your Gifts. These will typically be the first words of your activity statements. In reviewing my discoveries—Teaching others how to identify their WHAT, Speaking to groups and businesses about how to NICHETIZE, and Inspiring others to reinvent their lives and/or companies—the first words were Teaching, Speaking, and Inspiring.
At first I considered whether every one of these words was a separate Gift, as each resonated to my core. After thinking more deeply, though, I realized they're all part of an over-arching theme: Communication. And Communication is my true Gift.
That said, the three words remained individually important because they indicated what Vehicles I'd use to share my Gifts with the world. (Much more about Vehicles appears in the next chapter.)
Review your results, and write your Gifts below using one or, at most, two words for each. Also, if possible, identify an over-arching theme:
Many of my clients find identifying their Gifts provides one of the most powerful and satisfying feelings of their lives.
If you can pinpoint your Gifts and complete your WHAT equation, you'll probably feel like you've thrown a 500-pound bag of sand off your shoulders. It's often a very emotional experience.
Tania M., another Circle of 10 member, described finding her Gifts this way: “I cried when I saw the words in front of me. Tapping into my Gifts was extremely emotional, fulfilling, and scary all at once. Being so close to my core, and understanding how I'm wired, is more powerful than I can express.”
Similarly, seeing your own Gifts on paper should move you and put a fire in your belly.
If this isn't the case, the chances are you haven't identified your Gifts yet. Return to the start of this chapter, and keep at it until you feel down to your bones that you've found your true Gifts.
To recap, here are the steps required to identify your Gifts:
I understand this process may be confusing. If you reread this chapter and remain unclear about what to do, please visit WhatIsYourWhat.com/resources to watch the video titled “Step One for Discovering Your WHAT.” This short tutorial takes you step-by-step through exactly what to do.
When you've successfully completed this chapter, please proceed to Chapter 16 to embark on Steps 2 and 3.
- Shift from merely being awake to being alive.
- Find your sweet spot of life where the concentric circles overlap.
- Stop trying to impress people you don't really like.
- If you stand for nothing, you'll fall for anything.
- Every minute you engage in an activity you abhor reduces your life expectancy by an equal amount of time.
- The quality of your existence is determined largely by whether or not you listen to your gut.
- Use The Seven Seeds of Your Soul to discover your God-given Gifts.
- Pinpoint the nouns or adjectives and the over-arching theme that defines your Gift(s).
