YOU ARE NATURAL BUT AT WHAT

[Pravin Kumar]

A great stage director once said, "Acting is reacting. It's done with the ears, not the mouth." Contrary to popular belief, listening is not passive, it's active. How do you get someone's attention? It's not by talking or by making clever remarks or by trying to impress others with yourself. If you want to get people interested in you, talk about what's important to them. The biggest mistake most people make in communicating is talking about me, myself and I: "What I want to sell"... "These are my needs"... "I would like this to happen because I"....

Instead, turn your attention to the other person: "What are your needs?" "How can I help you?" Then listen. Always pivot the conversation around the other person. Talk about people, places and things that are important to him or her.

It's been said that by showing interest in people you can make more friends in twenty minutes than you can in twenty weeks. So be an active listener this week!

You’re a Natural, But at What? by Denis Waitley (excerpted from Becoming an Authentic MVP)

The secret to being an MVP is to play to your core competencies. To be your best, you need to do what you love and love what you do, and deliver more in value than you expect to receive in payment.

You must believe in your potential. But how do you know what it is? Your innate talents don’t always show up as high grades in high school, college or performance reviews. They show up in activities you do because you can hardly wait to do them. Surprisingly, many people are not employed in professions that fully utilize their natural gifts. They choose a convenient career, one in which they merely put in their hours and then go home to pursue what they really enjoy.

Achievers, like you, choose three courses of action:

1. They find out what career is most rewarding and interesting to pursue in order to use their full potential.
2. They sometimes find it necessary to go through several career and job changes and, in the process, test and discover new talents.
3. They use their professions and avocations to put more knowledge, skills and service into action.

Every talent you possess was given to you at your conception. Talents and personality traits are inborn. Behavior patterns are learned by environmental modeling over time. The earlier you discover your natural gifts and develop them, the happier and more successful you’ll become.

But it’s never too late to do an audit, especially during uncertain global economic conditions. Here are four ways to uncover your hidden treasures:

Take a Talent Test - Two non-profit foundations are your best bet: The Ball Foundation in Chicago and The Johnson O’Connor Foundation in New York City. You can do a quick Google search to find them. Both have solid reputations and The Ball Foundation offers an online version that is user-friendly and convenient. There are 19 innate talents that are identified and can be tested.

Dust Off Your Childhood - What did you love doing from ages 7 to 17? More than your report card from school, your extra-curricular activities reveal talents trying to grow from sprouts into trees. What was the most fun for you after school? On weekends? During vacations? Too often, our parents, peers and teachers influenced our elective courses and early career decisions, more than our own core competencies.

What are Your Current Hobbies? - Even if you can’t recall what you really excelled at and enjoyed doing most during your primary and secondary school years, a good way to discover your hidden talents is to seriously consider what turns you on most “after working hours,” in your current career. What do you look forward to after work? What do you enjoy most on weekends? If you didn’t need employment, what would you do with your time? There may be another career buried in one of your hobbies, or at least there may be a passion that you can express with community service or charitable work that may revitalize your motivation.

Take a Legitimate Behavior/Personality Test - We use the word “legitimate” test here because there are scores of simplistic personality tests that put you in one of four quadrants, but don’t give you the depth you need in understanding what behavior traits are working for you, and against you. The ones that major league sports franchises and corporations utilize most are those offered by The Winslow Research Institute in northern California. They are uncannily accurate and cannot be outguessed by participants trying to spin the results.

Desire for excellence is the most telling predictor of significant achievement. The success of our efforts depends largely on the motives behind those efforts. The most successful organizations, like the most successful men and women in almost all professions, attained their greatness out of a burning inner desire to use their talents to the fullest in order to solve a problem. Many, of course, became wealthy in the process with thousands of examples such as Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates. Far more than thoughts of material gain, the key to their success was inspiration by creating excellence in a product or service. All were motivated by that torch within driving them to express the very best that was in them.