Discovering Your Personal Strengths

Recently we had motivational speaker Carolyn Stern at The Ranch to speak about discovering your personal strengths.  It was a very interesting discussion, one that I wish I had been involved in when I was 25.  But I’ve learned that it’s never too late!

Carolyn started the class by addressing the three topics we would be discussing:

• Natural Talents
• Discovering Your Strengths
• Maximizing Your Personal Strengths

Let’s take a look at how to discover your natural talents.  Carolyn recommends writing out a list of tasks that you find easy, tasks that seem to fly by and tasks that make you happy. For me it was art, writing, photography, blogging, marketing and branding.  I seemed to have the same list for all three categories.

Here are the 6 essential lessons to maximize your personal strengths from Carolyn’s class:

1. Focus on your strengths, not your weaknesses.
2. An ability is a strength only if you can fathom yourself doing it repeatedly, happily, and successfully.
3. There are three raw materials of strengths: talents, knowledge, and skills.
4. The key to building your strength is to identify your dominant talents and then refine them with knowledge and skills.
5. There are five clues to help you identify your talents: spontaneous reactions, yearnings, rapid learning, satisfactions, and energy.
6. Organize your life around your strengths.

I can attest that doing this works.  Spending time doing what you love makes life that much sweeter.  Be honest with yourself with what you like to do and take suggestions from others with a grain of salt.  Trust me on this!

To learn more about Carolyn Stern and her services, visit her website here.