How to find out what you're good at (Discovering your Superpower)

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Long story short, “Strengths Finder 2.0″ is about discovering what your natural aptitudes and talents are, and how to best leverage them as you progress throughout your career in life.

By understanding your strengths, you are able to double down on what you are naturally inclined to do, as opposed to wasting an endless amount of time balancing out your weaknesses.

Let’s start off with this question: “In your career, have you had the opportunity to do what you do best every day?” According to the Gallup scientist test group, If you answered yes, you are only the one in three surveyors who actually stand true to that statement.

It may come off as shocking but when you think about it, how many people actually receive real genuine joy from their day-to-day jobs? If you ask any doctor, lawyer or accountant, it begs the question if they are actually engaged or thrilled with their careers. While it is not fair to make any assumptions, this is a point of reflection where you can ask yourself “am I really applying my natural talents in what I am doing?” Or better yet, “do I even understand what those natural talents are???” Rath comes across very strong when he mentions how the world is too focused on fixing our shortcomings walking on the “path of MOST resistance”, instead of choosing our careers based on honing our natural talents.

The two main steps of discovering your Superpower would involve:

Assess your natural Strengths
Understanding how to manage your Weaknesses

For those who don’t know

Tom Rath is a highly successful author who has been on a mission to help individuals best understand their natural talents, behaviours and aptitudes, in order to discover where to contribute or add value in any given setting. He has worked with Donald Clifton, who is the pioneer of the Clifton Strengths Finder Assessment and has incorporated his works into his bestselling books.

For instance, if you do not have great communication skills or like interacting with other people, you should not be in Sales, Public Relations or Marketing and if you are bad with numbers, you should not be in careers that involve mathematics and quantitative data. In Strengths Finder 2.0, Rath illustrates two primary concepts to help discover these talents in order to find the right careers for each individual.

Step #1: Assess your natural Superpower

When it comes to assessing your natural talents, Rath mentions how important it is to break them off into themes that connect certain traits or behaviours. In order to break them into themes, you can begin by asking high-level questions of working conditions and naturally tendencies such as “Do you prefer working in groups or by yourself?”, “Are the motivated by internal or external factors?”, and “Would you rather work with quantitative or qualitative data?”.

Think of it like a doctor assessing a patient’s physical and mental characteristics. When we do these types of tests, everyone has their own unique set of strengths and weaknesses.

The actual assessment in the Strengths Finder 2.0 from the Gallup Group has over 34 themes by analyzing an individual’s response to 177 behavioural and situational questions. It is important to note that this is only one method in terms of getting some type of understanding surrounding your natural tendencies, so don’t let this assessment define exactly who you are.

When I did the Gallup assessment myself, the five main themes I got were:

Futuristic
Input
Individualization
Achiever
Competition

Long story short, according to the Strengths Finder assessment, my natural tendencies and talents are that I constantly look ahead to the future, am curious about learning new information, loves to analyze other people’s characteristics while keeping myself busy and competing against others.

Step #2: Managing your Kryptonite

After understanding and assessing those natural tendencies, Rath explains that there are 3 main ways in order to manage and shore up those weaknesses:

If your weakness is not relevant to achieving your goal, simply don’t waste your time on it.

Let’s say you are a corporate lawyer, and one of your weaknesses is that you are not good at playing basketball. Since there is no correlation with your corporate law career and your skill level at basketball, save yourself some time and ignore it.

If that weakness needs to be improved, establish a process in order to manage or mitigate those lesser talents.

In this situation, developing a solid foundation of knowledge about the weakness will be extremely helpful in managing it. If you are an owner of a family restaurant, and your strengths include attracting customers and creating create great food recipes, however on the business side, you may tend to struggle with the numbers and accounting. It would be very beneficial for you to read up on small-business tax material, or even consider getting some consultation from a certified accountant. This will ensure that after you have completed the day-to-day tasks, you will have a clearer idea of how to handle accounting issues when managing your restaurant’s finances.

Partner or make alliances with other individuals that compliment your weakness.

We tend to see this a lot with great companies and how effective management teams are responsible for running their business. A common example would be the CEO-CTO tandem we tend to see with prominent tech companies like Jobs/Wozniak for Apple, Benioff/ Harris for Salesforce.com and Chesky/Gebbia for AirBnb. Through these partnerships, the CEO tends to focus on the day to day operations of the business which include sales, marketing & HR, while the CTO would focus on the product development at the technical level. This is a divide and conquer type of strategy by combining two contrasting skill sets.

Key takeaway:

By following these two easy steps to find your superpower, Rath would not let his readers forget that once you have found those strengths, nurture & develop them to their utmost limits to find great purpose in your everyday life and career.

If you have the chance, try taking the Gallup Strengths Finder test and see your own natural talents. If you are even more curious to read up on Tom Rath’s Strengths Finder 2.0 while supporting the channel click here: