There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self. --- Aldous Huxley
In What You Do Well, What You’re Good At and What It All Means, I showed you how to use what you do well and what you are good at to find your personal strengths. In this post, I’ll share how determining my personal strengths helped me find my best opportunity.
As a child, I told anyone who would listen that I wanted to be an engineer. In high school the majority of the classes I took were math and science, almost to the exclusion of everything else because that was all I believed I needed to study engineering.
My high school English teacher, Mrs. M.R. Walker, saw something in me that I was too focused on engineering to see in myself. She kept telling me that I should join the debate team – that I would do this well if I tried. Well I just couldn’t see it, I was too focused on numbers for all this talking and arm waving. It had nothing to do with engineering, how could debating be interesting? There wasn’t anything to calculate! But Mrs. Walker persisted - she hounded and harassed me until I relented. As a member of the debate team I won every single debate I entered. Even in light of that success, of finding something I did well, after a year I quit the team because it took time away from my plan to be an engineer.
What I was really good at had started to emerge, Miss Walker could see it, but I couldn’t because I didn’t want to see anything that would take me from the path I was committed to. As President of my senior class, my abilities as a persuasive communicator continued to “sneak out” in spite of myself.
In college, just as I’d planned, I studied mechanical engineering graduating cum laude with 12 engineering job offers in hand. I didn’t take any of them. Instead, I accepted a scholarship to study for a master’s degree in business at Carnegie Mellon University. After earning my MBA I spent five years working in corporate America with the nagging feeling that my educational and professional pursuits might not be the best way to use my real talents. Why hadn’t I taken the opportunity to be what I had always said I wanted to be - an engineer? I had no earthly idea what I was really good at and wouldn’t know for almost another decade.
When my alma mater called offering an opportunity to earn a Doctorate in Business I jumped at the opportunity. I don’t know why, I still was not sure what path I was on - only that the solitude of a corporate financial analyst was not what I wanted for my future, I was still searching for what I was good at. The second year of my Ph.D. program I was asked to teach an undergraduate course in the school of business. My only training to be an instructor was that I had been a student. So, armed only with a text book and an instructor’s manual, the location and time of the class and a pat on the back and “Good luck!” from my department chair, I met the Finance 101 class. When I dismissed the class 50 minutes later, I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my professional career. I stood in front of twenty-five strangers, taught them what I knew and they actually listened and learned from me. I loved it! Every class I taught got better and every student became a personal challenge. Did I have them today? Could I see it in there faces? Did we connect? Yes, yes and yes! The enrollment in my classes and the proficiency of my students proved it. Teaching is what I did well, but it was not what I was good at.
I didn’t know why I was a good teacher. After several years in the classroom, learning my profession and understanding its various components, I figured it out. What I was good at was persuasive public speaking, connecting with an audience, mastering ideas and information and then sharing that with a larger group. I am skilled at knowing what to say and the best way to say it, not just to classes but to any group about any thing and the larger the group, the better. This is what I was good at. Knowing this has taken me from the classroom, to political office, to consulting – knowing what I do well has helped me be successful in opportunities that play to my personal strengths.
If I had known what I was good at and what I did well it would have made a significant difference in my life. Since I discovered my personal strengths I am more focused. I have more purpose and fewer distractions in my life. I am more selective about what I do in my personal and professional life because I know where I am more likely to find success and satisfaction. Experience played an important part in my being able to finally see what I was good at and what I did well. Being told wasn’t enough, no matter who said it. I had to have enough varied experiences, both successful and unsuccessful, to see it for myself. You have the same portfolios of skills and experiences to reflect on, learn from and benefit from using the principles of Entretude.
This is the primary foundation of Entretude. You can use my four step process to learn right now what you’re good at. It becomes the lens through which you view all opportunities - the ones that present themselves as well as the opportunities you want to create for yourself. Without really knowing what you are good at, you may reach some of your goals but your path, like mine, will be longer and much more challenging than it has to be. By understanding your focus, your path to success is swifter and a heck of a lot more satisfying.
By the way, thanks Mrs. Walker, wherever you are.