How to shape career wellbeing
Key takeaways:
• Everyone wants to do more of the type of work that makes them feel strong
• In whatever position you find yourself at work, you can enhance your performance by investing in your innate talents
• To discover what gives you the edge at work, start by discovering your top five innate talent themes
Identifying your innate talents and building strengths starts with ensuring that you have the right mindset. There are several myths that can get in the way of you reaching your potential. Begin with learning to get past those myths. One of the myths is that “as you grow your personality changes.” The truth is that “as you grow you become more and more of who you already are.” Longitudinal studies indicate that core personality remains stable over long periods, demonstrating very small statistical differences over decades.
In order to build strengths and grow and develop with ease and feeling fulfilled during your career path, it is important to focus on your innate talents and invest in new skills and knowledge and experience. That is because our core attributes remain the same over time.
For example, as a manager and team leader you may have a natural talent for building teams and getting things done on time and to the specification agreed. You can become a strong team leader by investing on your natural talents such as gaining the knowledge and applying coaching competencies. These include:
- Creating and building trust
- Ensuring there is clarity and alignment in the expectations agreed
- Communicating effectively with your team (includes giving frequent feedback and acknowledgments)
- Keeping a strong coaching mindset which entails self-reflection
- Demonstrating accountability to your own and the team’s growth and development.
You intentionally utilize the innate talents of your team and invest in coaching your team members to discover their talents or potential so that they can develop and grow in the areas they feel strong at work. By doing so, you build an interdependent team that is engaged and performs over time.
Humans have a basic desire to be good at something and to receive respect and recognition for it. One of the best ways to end up in the kind of career that earns you respect, recognition, success and happiness is to do more of what you’re good at or do tasks and activities that make you feel strong before, during and after you do them.
Gallup research shows that those who get to do what they do best every day are six times as likely to be engaged in their jobs and three times as likely to report having an excellent quality of life.
Whether you feel stuck in your current job or you’re starting to explore new career options, you can use the results of the Gallup on-line assessment to identify your top five innate talent themes and improve your effectiveness and increase your performance — in any role. On the day that this article was written there are almost 30 million people who have taken this psychometric instrument that used to be called the StrengthsfFinder and it was invented by Don Clifton as a tool that focuses on 34 group of talents called themes that make up the user’s personality with the highest number of themes being your most significant group of talents referred to as your edge.
You can attend the Strength Workshop designed for anyone who wants to discover their top five significant themes, or the innate talents that drive their energy and potential to produce consistently desired results. The attendees will get a code to access and complete a Gallup Strengths assessment and receive a thorough report. What you discover about yourself in this workshop will always stay with you in any role that you play including a coach, manager, professional at work, parent at home.
The exact job you really want is more likely to become clear to you when you understand what you’re naturally good at and what brings you the respect you’re looking for.
What are some of the signs for selecting the correct career after knowing your innate talents?
For some of you, your answers to the questions above will reveal exactly why you’re in the role you’re in; for others, it might make you realize that something is “off” and that what you’re currently doing doesn’t allow you to do what you do best often enough.
Whichever situation you find yourself in, you can use what you learn to better align your talents with how you go about doing your job every day. You can borrow some of the ingredients that made your strongest moment so great and apply them to new ways of approaching the tasks and activities you enjoy less.
As outlined in the example above, the manager plays an instrumental role in increasing the engagement of the team members and raising the team performance. Start by talking with your manager about any ideas you have for using your strengths more often – they will know of projects and partnerships that will allow you to use your most dominant innate talent themes.
If you hear someone say “you can be anything you want to be”, it may ring true at first since you may well have heard this as a fact from some of your role models like parents or teachers through the years however this is another myth to reflect on. The truth is that you probably can’t be anything you want to be because you just can’t be good at everything. No one is good at everything! It is a fact however, that if you know and apply your innate talents building on the skills and knowledge in your role, you can be more successful. Your innate talents don’t determine or limit your career choices, they provide the opportunity to make work more enjoyable because when you identify them and own them, you can start to intentionally aim them at the goals that matter most to you, your team and the organization you work in. And, what we know is that when you like what you do, you become better at it.
In conclusion, sometimes you are asking the wrong question and the key in finding career success is not asking, “What career should I have?” It’s about aligning the tasks and activities that naturally make you feel strong which lead to you developing and performing in just about any career. So, the one question to answer is “what are you naturally good at?” Because we know, that is one sure sign of building strength and feeling strong at work and your best chance to produce extraordinary results.