Do you use your unique set of these talents to accomplish your goals on a daily basis?
Think about it but lots of people spend a majority of their time doing things that they don’t enjoy doing or even just doing things they aren’t good at.
That’s why I set out to discover how to find my natural strengths. To make it easier to remember I created an acronym that we can use to discover our natural talents.
It’s called the STEP formula. Each letter in the formula stands for a different method I used to discover my unique talents.
You’re going to learn
- how to find out what you naturally do best
- learn how to develop your greatest talents
- use your strengths to live your best life
Bonus: Find Your Natural talents by getting the STEP Formula Spreadsheet
Exercises
Know What You Love Doing
Think about what you love to do even when you’re not being paid to do it. What activities can you spend hours and hours doing for fun? The things you find fun can sometimes be your natural talents. Knowing your gifts and talents is essential to creating a life that plays to your natural strengths and talents.
Make a list of things that interested you as a kid
Keep track of the things you enjoy doing, things you may not realize could be talents.
Try things that are easy. Things that you naturally find easy could potentially be talents you possess that you may not realize. We can also try things that are hard. We’re hardly ever good at things the first time we try them. However, maybe over time we’ve become more coordinated or learned some new skills that make us better at some of the things we weren’t previously good at.
Tools & Techniques
Strengths Finder 2.0
Strengths Finder is the easiest way to find out what our strengths are.
Strengths Finder like I mentioned before helps identify your natural talents in 5 minutes. It comes with a book which you can read in an hour but the way you find your strengths is through an online assessment.
After completing the assessment strengths finder spits back this monster report that lets you know what your top 5 strengths are.
All 34 strengths are broken down into 4 categories or themes as Strengths Finder likes to call them.
Executing themes represent how you put ideas into action and get things done.
Influencing themes are skills that show how you can enable groups or individuals to reach bigger goals.
Relationship building themes focus on how we fit into the bigger picture so we can make the best personal connections for us to thrive in an organization.
Strategic thinking themes can take a thought or idea and look for the best way to move forward on it.
Strengths finder finds you top 5 strengths and builds a personalized action plan so you can maximize your potential.
It taught me to use my strengths like being competitive to my advantage by competing with myself every day.
Ask your friends and family
One of the easiest ways to find our natural talents is to ask the people who know us the best.
Sometimes our friends see potential in us that we fail to recognize in ourselves. We may not even be aware of some of the talents they think we excel in but we don’t see. The easiest way to find out is to ask them. Feel free to copy and paste this text below.
Hey what's up, I'm trying to find what my natural skills are so I'm asking some of my best friends for some honest feedback on what you feel like my superpower is.
Of course, in return, you can let them know what you think their special talents are as well.
Turn Talents into Skills
Reverse engineer the talent into smaller learning chunks
Every talent can be broken down into smaller skills. In sports, practice consists of drills to make you better at one particular skill that contributes to your overall talent. The same can be said for any other talent.
Write all the skills that make up the talent you want to learn and if there’s an order you should learn them in to make learning easier. Afterward, it’s time to move to the next step.
Practice
As the famous saying goes: “Practice makes permanent”.
To turn out talents into skills we need to take some time every day to get better at them. Set aside a block of time every morning or evening depending on what works best for you to practice honing your new skills.
Repetition is truly the father of learning, the more you practice a skill the better you’ll get at it.
Find other talented people
Want to learn faster? Find people who have already done the things you want to do. These people can help you learn faster by telling you what worked best for them along with some of their mistakes and what they learned from them.
To help me deliver the best show possible
•Leave an honest review on iTunes, I read every one.
Here is a list of resources mentioned in this episode:
Right-click here and choose “save as” to download this episode to your computer