Superhero

There is a quote that says, “There is a superhero inside all of us we just need the courage to put on the cape”.  I think that courage comes from self-awareness and an accurate sense of where we can be our best selves.

We all spend a lot of time and energy managing our reputations, shaping the impressions of others and taking deliberate steps to advance a personal brand story that reflects not only who we are but also who we would like to be.  In last week’s blog where I discussed personal brand, I commented that “authenticity” is important.  Touching base and periodically taking a look at our personal strengths is a great way to ensure that we are always operating from an “authentic” place.

Unlike our reputation, which is an “outside- in” perspective, our true understanding of our strengths is best explored from our own emotional connection to our work and lives. According to Marcus Buckingham, in his book,  Go Put Your Strengths to Work, looking outside yourself for objective assessment of your strengths is a mistake.  Buckingham claims: “If your strengths are those activities that make you feel strong, then the person most qualified to identify them—indeed the only person qualified to identify them is you.  You know which activities draw you back to them time and again. You know which activities you cannot help volunteering for. You know which activities keep your interest and your concentration with almost no effort.”

I conducted a strengths retreat for a client organization this week and we began with the following exercise. You can try this yourself:

1.       Capture a list of all the activities you complete in one week of work.  Keep a running log for a whole week listing all your activities or simply look back at the past week and try to remember everything you did.  If you are like most of us, your list will include tasks big and small, some you loved, some you loathed and some you had little reaction to at all.

2.       At the end of the week or after you cannot think of anything else to list, review the list of activities. Select the activities you loved, the ones that made you feel strong.  The tasks that: came naturally and even though they may have been challenging they left you feeling more energized than drained.

3.       Now “fine- tune” these favored activities.  Try and elaborate on each one. Identify why they made you feel so good.  Was there a particular situational aspect that appealed; a work partner and audience, or outcome than made these tasks more appealing?

4.       Next, write a sentence describing each these activities.   Begin the sentence with “I felt strong when…..”.  After you have completed this for each of the activities you loved, read them out loud.  You should feel a strong commitment to each of these statements.  Try to fine tune the wording until it feels “just right”.

Now, you are on your way to understanding your true strengths.  Consider how you might focus more on these types of activities in your current role.  I promise you will be more successful than you ever imagined if you can spend the majority of your time playing to your strengths.  

Pick up Marcus Buckingham’s book if you like this exercise.  His step by step guide can help you re-engineer your career to leverage all of your strengths, all of the time.

Exercising your strengths is like working your muscles, in the words of fitness author Chalene Johnson,

“Strength is seen on the outside but built on the inside”

image credit: slideshare.net