With how busy we all are, how much we have to do, and all the additional things we’d like to do – wouldn’t it be nice to have a superpower or two to help get more done? We’ve already figured out that just working harder, or putting in more hours, isn’t going to work. So what to do? Well one answer is to start leveraging your real world superpowers. (Okay, so play along with me for a minute here…it gets good pretty fast.)
Real World Superpowers?
What do I mean by real world superpowers? Well, if you were, say, 10 times stronger than normal wouldn’t you say that was super-human or a superpower? Or if you could run 10 times faster than average…would that be a superpower?
Well, the Pareto Principle (a.k.a. the 80/20 Rule) tells us that on average we produce 80% of our results from just 20% of our efforts. If we stop and think about it for a moment – and do a little math – we realize that the 20% isn’t just twice as productive, or even four times as productive, instead it’s actually 16 times more productive than the other 80%! You see, we all already have superpowers, (which I grant you most people simply call ‘strengths’). But we just aren’t used to focusing on them. Instead we’re told to focus on, and get better at, our weaknesses. But that’s a bad plan if you want to significantly improve your results.
Most of us haven’t been taught to focus on our strengths – as obvious as it is when you see it in writing. But think about it. Is being significantly (say 16 times) better at closing a sale, creating a project plan, developing a website, or leading a team really any different than being 16 times stronger when it comes to performance? (Well, okay, maybe it is a little different if you’re trying to push your car out of the garage, but don’t miss the point!) What we need to be able to do is identify that 20%, our strengths.
The challenge for most of us is that while we’re usually very good at identifying our weaknesses, we’re actually pretty bad at identifying what we’re good at. Because what we’re good at ‘comes so easy for us’ that we assume everyone can do it – and, that is the key! It comes easy to us…
The Definition of a Strength (a.k.a. a ‘Superpower’)
The Gallup organization defines a strength as “consistent excellent performance in an activity, which takes relatively little effort, and energizes the individual.” Furthermore, they say our ability to provide that ‘consistent excellence performance’ (a.k.a. a strength) is made up of 3 components:
- talent themes (a.k.a. ‘talents’) – our unique personality, or ‘who we are’;
- knowledge – ‘what we know’; and
- skills – ‘what we know how to do’. (So a skill has action to it.)
Note: It’s interesting to note that this description doesn’t include work experience or formal education – as those are only two ways to acquire knowledge and skills.
What’s so valuable about knowing this make-up of a strength is that Gallup tells us that talent themes are not teachable (we’re either ’empathetic’ or we’re not). So knowing our unique ‘Top 5’ talent themes give us insight into how we can compete in a manner that others can’t copy, because they don’t have our combination of talent themes.
Furthermore, knowledge and skills can be taught. So we now have a ‘formula’, or recipe, for defining and building strengths. Discover your talent themes, then add specific knowledge and skills to build the strengths you desire – or describe the strengths you already have.
3 Steps to Identifying Your Strengths (‘Superpowers’)
Here are three steps you can take to identify (and develop) your strengths.
- Take Gallup’s the StrengthsFinder assessment and get your ‘Top 5’ Talent Themes. These tend to explain 80% – 85% of your personality. (You can get a code here to take this online assessment for only $15 or so.)
- I encourage to ‘personalize’ the descriptive paragraphs of each of your Top 5 themes, so that they exactly describes you.
- Take some time to think about how you add specific, high-value, knowledge and skills to these talent themes to describe your strengths.
If that approach seems too ‘mechanical’ for you…try this.
An alternative to this is to think about those activities that:
a) you’re good at
b) are something you like/want to do,
c) challenge you in the way you want to be challenged,
d) fulfills an innate need for you.
These tend to be things that you’re good at, take little effort and energize you. (Sound like a strength?)
Once you have these, you can develop them by…
- Positioning yourself to more often use your talent themes; and
- Work to grow your knowledge and/or skills in key high-value areas.
For some this comes naturally, but for others this introspection can be a challenge. I’ve taken many people through this process, along with leveraging other ways to clearly define and develop your strengths. If you want to have a conversation about how I can help you, just go to my ‘contact me’ page and we’ll find a time to connect.
