How To Put Your Strengths To Work

Learn More To Earn More

I’ve made it a study to discover what are the Thinking Style of Super Achievers because the first step in doing what successful people do, is to think how they think. One success habit I see is successful people consume information. They go to the experts in order to learn more, because to earn more, you’ve got to learn more! This month I just finished Marcus Buckingham’s book, “Go Put Your Strengths To Work”. Marcus has just got on my list of a “super achiever” that I want to meet! This book is more than a great read, I’ve also used it as a workbook to incorporate the information.

Identifying Strengths Through Activities

This one exercise is profoundly helping me focus on what I’m great at. What I’m doing everyday is sorting through my daily activities and pinpointing precisely what invigorates me and what depletes me. Your strengths are those activities that you tend to do consistently and near perfectly. I’ve been paying attention to the activities that make me feel strong and those that make me feel weak. Paying attention to the feelings around activities is key. How you feel at an activity is a solid indicator of a strength.

Where Do You Feel Strong?

For example, this week I felt strong when I was doing a conference call training for 50 sales and customer service professionals. I also felt strong when I was writing an article for a publication. Strengths begin where you have a sense of achievement and success. I’ve realized I’m drawn to activities where I am distributing information whether via workshops, conferences, phone calls or even one-on-one. The key for me is distributing information. It simply energizes me! It has this I-can’t-help-but-do-it quality. These two activities feel easy for me and time tends to stand still when I’m engaged in them.

Ask yourself:

What activities do you do that you just seem to have success with?
What activities do you naturally feel drawn to?
What activities are easy for you to pick up? What doesn’t seem hard to learn?
What activities do you want to read up on and refine with new tricks and techniques?
What activities challenge you in a way you like to be challenged in?

Develop a Strong Week Plan

Once you’ve clarified a few of your signature strengths, it’s up to you to frame your week by playing to those strengths. If you can fill your week with doing more strengths than weaknesses, you’ve got a strong week! The best suggestion from Go Put Your Strengths To Work is to find those activities at work that play to those strengths and then try to fill most of our time with them. My two daily reflection questions this month have been:

What did I do today that made me feel strong?
How can I incorporate this strength more into my daily activities?

This daily routine is helping make the best of my job, most of my job! Each day I’m identifying one or two activities that make me feel strong and getting creative in developing a strategy to do more of this activity. Not only has my focus increase but my sense of fulfillment has gone through the roof! Replicate this routine and you’ll notice an increase in performance!