Finding Your Strengths

We all have individual strengths that we can leverage in this world to help create a career and a life that we get much more satisfaction from if we take advantage of these strengths. Many of us ignore what we are good at and seemingly end up in a career that we are not cut out for. It's up to us to take the time to get to know ourselves better and understand our natural strengths. I encourage people to take free online personality tests like the humanmetrics.com test, read a book like the "What Color is Your Parachute" series or just sit down and journal at night before you go to bed about areas of interest or things that you have always enjoyed doing (ps. I don't have any affiliation with the above mentioned site or book). These will help you at least gain some insight into areas of interest so you can further investigate.

I have a good friend who went to school and decided to be an Accountant largely because his family thought it would be a respectable and lucrative career. Having said this my friend was actually decent with numbers but it wasn't until he started working for a large accounting firm that he realized that this was simply not his cup of tea. His main complaint was that he had hardly no interaction with people. While he was at this firm he did some soul searching and took half an hour each day dedicated to finding and developing his strengths and reevaluating what was missing in his life. He decided to get his real estate license and start a small real estate practice on the nights and weekends. Long story short he quit his accounting gig within one year of starting his real estate practice and is now a much happier individual because of it. The only reason he is doing so well today is because he took the time to find and use all of his strengths (people skills, sales skills and numbers) . Many of us get too caught up in the daily grind to know that we are not spending enough time developing our biggest asset...us!

Looking at my friend's story when we do take the time to evaluate our strengths so many people out there tell you that you should do what ever it is you want to do in this world and I have to say that I don't agree with this theory. I think you should take this a step further and first find your strengths, develop them further and then use them on something that you would like to obtain! For example: If I decided that I wanted to build an online social media site for tennis players even though I love playing tennis and know a ton about the game I know absolutely zero about creating an online social networking site and nor do I have the desire to learn. So many of us get into this thought process but lose scope of what we are good at and how to leverage our assets!~ The key is to stop focusing in on the societal ideal of success and start to define your own ideal!

I saw an interview with David Beckham a few years ago and in the interview Beckham said that the reason he has done so well was that he had always known what his strengths were and that everything else after that was just practice. Well said.

Best in all of your career and life goals!

Christopher
http://www.TheCareerMovement.com

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