Discovering Your Strengths (2012)

- Are you in the right career? Are you just meant to do what you're doing? Your answer to these questions, how well your strengths and abilities match your day-to-day work, will have a big impact on your quality of life. In my book, Invaluable, I explored how to help individuals increase the value of their time and quality of work life. In other words, how to become invaluable. This course, Discovering your strengths, is part of a five-course series on helping you become invaluable and get the most from your career.

In my coaching, the first factor in becoming invaluable is unlocking your abilities, which is essentially discovering your strengths so that you can harness them. The invaluable factor of ability is pretty simple. It represents how well you do what you do, or how much value you actually provide to the company or the customers that you work with. When you started in your current position, you brought a certain skill level that allowed you to get the job. However, getting a job does not make you invaluable.

You also need to increase your overall capacity to provide real, tangible value when you work. In simple terms, ability is a measurement of how well you're exceeding your boss' or customers' expectations. While there are many ways to discover your strengths, this course will focus on the path of improvement that will give you the most benefit for the least effort. First, we're going to help you figure out what your talents are. We'll take you through a process of understanding what you just naturally excel at doing.

When you put your efforts into the things that you already do well, you'll actually get greater benefit than wasting a lot of energy on the things that aren't your strengths. In fact, one of the characteristics of highly-successful people, is that they've learned to build on their strengths, not try to improve on their weaknesses. After we've helped you discover your talents, then we'll work on matching the job responsibilities that you have, or would like to have, to those talents.

In today's competitive market, it's important to continually improve and move forward. We'll help you put together an action plan to do that. So, let's begin the process of discovering your strengths.