Reason why you have to discover your talent and use it positively

Finding our natural talents can be quite difficult to do. For me, it took me some period of time to find out that I was good at singing .

It was a skill that I knew I had when I was young , especially when I was in high school.

Much like many other people, discovering what your talents are can be extremely hard to figure out. Because of that, I sought out expert advice on how to not only identify, but embrace and hone in on your natural talents. I reached out to Doug Wilks, a talent investigator who founded StrengthsLauncher.

Doug Wilks provided these 3 key insights to discover what your natural talents are:

1.What Thrilled You As A Child?

Take two minutes and recall your most joyous memories from elementary school.

What made those moments so enjoyable? What were the common threads?

Were you highly competitive as a 9-year-old? Maybe you loved soccer and couldn’t wait for recess every day. You lived for it. You cherished that moment you could run out to the practice field and start competing.

Or, maybe you enjoyed working on big, competitive, team-oriented projects? Your friends loved it when you were in their group. You had a knack for nudging the whole team’s grade from B- to A . You relished these opportunities. It was thrilling.

As you ponder these childhood memories, consider what similar activities thrill you as an adult.

You may still be highly competitive, but now you’re competing to win new business for your start-up. You may still love complex, strategic projects, but now you do it for an international consulting firm.

Why do we make certain choices and enjoy certain activities? Why are we better at some things than others?

If you’ve ever taken the StrengthsFinder 2.0 assessment, you know that a “talent theme” (to use Gallup’s terminology) is a naturally recurring pattern of thought, feeling or behavior that can be productively applied.

Understanding your unique talents gives you answers to these questions. Your unique talents show you why you make certain choices, enjoy certain activities and are better at some things than others. In fact, there’s only a 1-in-33 million chance you have the same top 5 talent themes as another person!

So, understand that what thrilled you as a grade school student and what thrills you as an adult are actually very similar. You’re just using those same talent themes–Competition and Strategic–in different environments.

What work tasks today most closely resemble that joy you felt 20, 30 years ago?

Find ways to tilt your work today toward those moments that thrilled you from yesterday.

Those grade school memories are powerful stories that reveal what your talents are and how to use them.

2. You Lose Track of Time

Imagine this: It’s 9:00 AM Saturday morning. Your time is your own. No soccer games, no carpool, no TPS report cover sheets.

Somehow, you have a free calendar for a few hours.

You begin a favorite activity. Maybe it’s playing guitar or gardening or writing that novel. Maybe it’s coding Python for that personal pet project you started months ago.

This activity, whenever you do it, pulls you in like a tractor beam. Your mind, body and intuition begin working in perfect symmetry. You lose track of time. Before you know it, it’s 12:30 and you haven’t even thought about lunch yet.

What if work was just as fulfilling as your Saturday morning side project? Is it even possible to capture and harness that magic?

Yes-take very close note of moments like this. If you’re so captivated in an activity that you lose track of time, you’re experiencing one of the key symptoms of flow.

And, if you’re experiencing any amount of flow on a project, you’re most likely also using one or more of your natural talents.

3. What do you yearn to do?

What fire is burning inside of you at this very moment?

There’s never been an easier time in the course of human history to begin fulfilling your life’s mission than right now.

Do you love writing? Cool. Start a blog.

Can you crochet better than anyone in the tri-state area? Great. Make a few extra scarves and sell them on Etsy.

Does even thinking about meeting and connecting with new people send you into happiness overdrive? Perfect. Launch a meet-up for local executives in your city.

Enjoy all three? Even better. Start a monthly meet-up for expert crochet bloggers.

In a perfect world, everyone would get to use their strengths at work every day.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case for most people. In fact, 63% of workers worldwide are not engaged in their work. This doesn’t even include the 24% who are actively disengaged.

While there are multiple reasons for this, one of the key factors is most workers don’t get to use their natural talents at work on a daily basis.

Think about it. In nature, eagles can fly between 75 and 125 miles a day. Wild elephants can roam up to 50 miles a day. If that eagle or elephant is locked-up in a cage, they’re not living the way they were made to live. They’ve been stifled, suffocated, trapped.

Similarly, millions of workers aren’t able to do what they were made to do on a daily basis.

What do you yearn to do?

–

If you find yourself in a place where you’re not using your gifts, that realization can be painful and uncomfortable. Thankfully, life is a journey, not one isolated day.

Find at least one small way to begin recapturing some of that joy you felt back in grade school. Get lost in a favorite activity and lose track of time on a Saturday morning. Hone in on what you yearn to do, and start doing it.

How have you been able to hone in on your natural talents and use them in the work force?

Comment below!

PUBLISHED ON: SEP 16, 2015

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PRODUCTIVITY

This Retailer Spent $30,000 on Its Employees–and Got $3 Million of Sales in Return

Gap stores conducted research that might turn industry labor practices upside down–while squashing 4 productivity killers along the way.

By Scott MautzAuthor, ‘Find the Fire: Ignite Your Inspiration and Make Work Exciting Again’@scott_mautz

Everyone’s looking for the keys to improved productivity and a way to dramatically improve performance. There are few industries more in need of such secrets than retail, which typically operates on razor-thin margins off of an epic struggle to achieve 1 percent annual sales increases.

But an astounding study conducted by researchers working with Gap stores just uncovered a major productivity boon.

The 28-store study pitted “control” stores against stores that intentionally provided employees with consistent work schedules. This included:

Eliminating store managers’ ability to cancel a shift on an employee up to two hours before the shift started

Requiring employee schedules to be posted two weeks in advance (and keeping consistent schedules in general)

Guaranteeing a core group of employees 20 hours a week

Setting consistent start and end times for shifts

Increasing staffing during surge times

In case you’re wondering, all of this isn’t standard practice for retail. “The conventional wisdom is that lean, unstable scheduling is inevitable in today’s fast-paced, low-profit brick-and-mortar environment,” the researchers reported in Harvard Business Review.

Turns out conventional wisdom ain’t so wise.

The stores that embraced the concept of consistency saw an astounding 7 percent increase in store revenue. A $30,000 investment in labor hours yielded almost $3 million in incremental sales.

The stores also saw decreases in theft, managers spending much less time on scheduling (in one case reducing the time from three days to four hours), and improved stock organization. Better organization meant fewer “false out-of-stocks” (in which employees mistakenly believe they don’t have a requested item in the midst of a disorganized stock room).

Find all these benefits hard to believe? The steady schedule had a huge positive impact merely by enabling employees to more consistently be on time–knowing what bus to catch, for example.

The study highlighted four productivity drains common in many businesses (ones that you can avoid):

1. Lack of consistency

It should raise eyebrows that something as simple as consistency can have such profound effects. But social science isn’t surprised.

In fact, research by social psychologist David De Cremer indicates that inconsistency in work patterns (and leaders) confuses people, erodes trust, causes fear, and can lead to “learned inertia,” in which employees, paralyzed by uncertainty, disengage from their jobs and avoid interactions with inconsistent managers.

People need patterns. Patterns produce certainty. Certainty allows employees to focus on productivity-boosting behaviors–such as, in this case, providing better service.

So pay attention to not only what you’re asking your employees to do but also how you’re asking them to do it.

2. A tendency to ignore hidden costs

In retail, it’s tempting to focus on the short-term profitability gains of cutting staff–and ignore the long-term costs of decreasing revenue and diminishing customer experience and brand perception. When we don’t ask ourselves about the hidden costs of a profit-enhancing dictate, we overlook the true net total impact on productivity and other important metrics.

So, entrepreneurs and other leaders seeking short-term profit, carefully consider any hidden costs of cost-reduction efforts.

3. Misaligned goals

Gap unveiled what many companies struggle with–the boss dictates one thing, but those closest to the business want to do another. In Gap’s case, this led to havoc-wreaking incidents. A shipping mistake sent 5,000 units of product to a store versus 2,000, throwing the reduced staff into a frenzy of unexpected, non-customer-facing work.

I often saw initiatives change on a dime in corporate life. Poorly communicated HQ-driven marketing initiatives created major headaches for the sales force, causing them to manage executional details rather than spend time on selling to customers.

So, leaders, ensure the goals of your “HQ” (even if HQ is just you) are closely aligned with those on the frontlines.

4. Lack of autonomy

The study gave store managers discretion to implement the proposed changes as they saw fit. Such discretion led to astonishingly better results. When HQ micromanaged, it caused trouble.

For example, the study cited frequent visits from HQ leadership as disruptive, keeping store employees from doing their core work. I personally experienced this quite often in corporate, where an upcoming leadership visit would throw a team into weeks of over-the-top, unnecessary prep work to ensure a “good meeting.”

I came to learn that people fear a bad meeting more than a bad result, and leadership visits feed this unhelpful chain of events. I even heard that one plant manager had his team spray paint the grass outside the plant green to make it look spiffy for an HQ visit.

If you’re part of HQ, embrace the power of autonomy. Have awareness of what happens when you don’t grant it.

Net, let’s revel in what retail has taught us and ring up productivity gains by squashing inconsistency and other productivity killers.