Wisdom is knowing what to do next; Skill is knowing how to do it, and Virtue is doing it.What You Do Well, What You’re Good at and What It All Means --- David Starr Jordan
You’ve been earning your own living for a while now. You may have held a variety of jobs or positions – perhaps even taken a stab at entrepreneurship. If you’ve achieved some level of success somewhere along the line you’ve developed an approach to solving problems that works. Experience has taught you how to work, hopefully smarter not just harder and, to value quality in your work and your life. In other words, you have skills – valuable skills – and talent that are applicable to more than the job you have or the jobs you’ve had. Your professional skills, your talent and experience will inform your future and in this post, I’ll show you how to assess your professional skills, talent and experiences so that you can use the principles of Entretude to better inform your second act.
A basic principle of Entretude is that your best opportunity is always one that you create for yourself. When you have an entrepreneurial approach to life you build on your strengths and use them to identify your best opportunities. In this post we’ll lay the foundation for that awareness. I’ll show you how to find your personal strengths and then start to use them to base your best opportunities on.
To recognize your personal strengths, you have to know the difference between what you do well and what you are good at. The activities that you do well at are within the things you do every day: earn a living, develop and maintain relationships and interact with other people; you seek, retain and share information; negotiate, direct and schedule your actions and the actions of others - these seemingly mundane activities are opportunities to do a variety of things well.
What you are good at is the engine that drives what you do well. It is the reservoir of personal skills and attributes that you draw from over and over again, combine with each other and build on each time you do something well. The challenge is to understand what those personal skills and attributes are – what you’re good at - and how they drive what you do well. Without this self knowledge it will be difficult to develop and capitalize on your best opportunities – the ones that you create for yourself.
Here’s an easy four-step process to help you determine what you’re good at and what you do well:
1. Make a list of ten things you did well or skills you acquired/improved in the last twelve months. They can relate to work, personal relationships, community activities or things you do for fun.
2. Write down one to three other skills, talents or experiences that helped you do each of the ten things well, like getting along well with or motivating people, speaking persuasively, developing a vision or making plans for yourself or others, explaining ideas clearly, combining ideas in innovative ways to come up with new thoughts or putting a personal twist on a mundane task. Your talents could also be more general - determination, willingness to work hard, discipline or selflessness.
3. Identify the skills, talents and experiences that appear:
• If a skill, talent or experience appears more than four times on your list, it’s a strong indicator of what you’re good at;
• If a skill, talent or experience appears between two and four times it is closely related to what you are good at;
• If a skill, talent or experience appears less than two times - these skills are skills you don’t use very often.
4. You’ll now use these skills, talents and experience – what you’re good at - as a filter through which you view what you’re doing now and what you would like to do in the future. When you consider an opportunity - list the skills and talents necessary for success. If more of those skills and talents are on your list of things you’re good at – that is a good indication that this opportunity will probably be something you do well. In other words you’ve identified something that it may represent your best opportunity.
Now you know what you’re good at. Your next step is to determine the best environment in which to put these talents to work.
