Self-assessment of gifts

- Your strengths are made up of three things, your gifts, your loves, and your skills. So the first step to discovering your strengths is to understand your gifts. Your gifts are the things that come naturally to you. They've always been there, and are a part of your personality. Sometimes these gifts show up early in life, and sometimes they appear much later as a welcomed surprise. Whatever your gifts are, we want to identify and understand them.

Making your gifts stronger will give you the greatest amount of growth in the shortest amount of time. To make this process easy for you, I've created a simple worksheet that you can use. First, you'll answer the series of questions yourself, and then you'll have someone else respond to the questions. Let's cover the questions you answer about yourself. You can ignore the Both column for now. With all these questions, just write down the first thing that comes to mind.

Don't overthink your response, and yes do write it down. Written responses are important to the whole process. The first question is, what comes easily to you? Think about the first thing that comes to mind. What tasks take little effort on your part? Write your response down. Next is a question about when you were younger, under the age of 10 or so. When you were a child, what sort of things came easily to you? Think about the things you just naturally took to back then.

Write down your answers. Next, what are the areas where you've received awards, won contests, or received public praise? Recognition like this is an outside validation of what your gifts may be. Write your answers down. Next, what are the areas where others have said, "I wish I could do that as well as you"? Of course, when you give the second part of the worksheet to someone else, they'll give their answer to this question. But for now, answer it from your perspective.

Can you remember someone saying this to you? And what did they say it about? Write that down. Next, if you've taken any kind of personality or strengths assessment before, write down what you discovered about yourself in this row. If not, you can skip this question. Finally, take some time for quiet introspection. Just ponder for five minutes. That means do nothing else but sit, think, and focus on this question.

What are your natural gifts? Set a timer for yourself for five minutes, and quietly think about that. After the time is up, write down your answer. This quiet introspection is an invitation to slow down and remember something about yourself that you may have forgotten. With your answers to these questions written down, you're ready to move on to receiving feedback about your gifts.