Eddie (Bradley Cooper) is a smart but struggling writer who can’t seem to get a hold of himself and finish his book already. By strange coincidence he comes across a Magic Pill that creates new brain circuits and allows him to access 100% capacity of his brain. He becomes invincible, THE smartest guy in town, developing new talents and changing his personality. He finishes his book in no time, makes insane amounts of money on the stock market, learns to speak new languages in just 3 days and play a piano like a maestro. Give me the pill please. Except the new founded glory doesn’t last long, the side effects are massive and the success the pill brought, isn’t sustainable.
So, back to reality .
The closest we will ever get to the Magic Pill is by increasing awareness of our talents and gifts and developing the necessary habits to harness them.
MAGIC = TALENTS X HABITS
Reaching your highest potential is only possible by building on your strengths, consistently.
Being aware of your strengths will produce confidence and motivate you to do better. It will also help you with healthy emotions, resourcefulness, self-reliance and better relationship with your colleagues and family.
Depending on how aware you are of your strengths, you are most likely already practising them because your strengths are your patterns of behaviour, thinking and feeling.
Knowing your strengths is beneficial for:
- Increasing confidence for achieving desired results.
- Taking on lead and assignments that require your strengths.
- Create opportunities within the existing job place that would be beneficial for you and your employer.
- Creating your own business.
How do you increase awareness about your strengths?
By reflecting on and describing stories when you were at your best.
You can start by using Reflected Best Self Exercise (Tool 1) to learn about yourself and apply your best self in daily situations. This tool is widely used in corporate trainings, team building, executive leadership and graduate programmes. It includes five practices:
1. Noticing Positive Feedback
In order to identify patterns or themes start paying attention to the feedback you receive from your environment, colleagues, friends and family. Write it down. Ask yourself how can you express more of what you have learned from the feedback.
2. Ask questions
Feedback you received is an opportunity for learning, so try to understand further the impact you have made based on the comments. The idea is to make the feedback actionable and leverage able.
3. Study your success
Athletes watch and re-watch their game so they can learn about what went well and what didn’t. You can do the same by taking on a regular journaling practice. Self-analysis is just as important as receiving the feedback from others, if not more. You might want to write what went well for you today and why you think that was. What were the factors internal and external that allowed you to be your best? Try capturing the context and how it can be used in different situations.
4. Create a habit of being your best
Identify the aspect of your work where you can incorporate your talents. This is also a good time to ask yourself how well is your current working environment serving your talents. Are you able, and to what degree, to use your strengths?
5. Create value for others
Recognise others contributions and talents to help them progress as. No man is an island, and we need each other to thrive.
Another tool that I recommend comes from professional coaching and is actually related to discovering your purpose and values (Tool 2). This exercise helps you examine your past experiences, so you can first, discover your strengths and patterns and second, create you own mission statement (your “why”).
The central question you are answering in this exercise is: When were you in your own Element (at your best)?
Start by listing a dozen or more examples of times in your life when you knew your were on purpose. You may go back as far as into your childhood. After describing the event ask yourself:
- What was essential to my sense of being on purpose?
- What about this experience was so satisfying?
- What was of value to me?
Highlight the key words or phrases that keep coming up and create a statement based on these findings. In addition to reminding yourself what activities you perform naturally well, this exercise also enables you to clarify which values are at play during these activities. This exercise serves as a guide for your future decisions as well as creating possibilities for moving forward.
Both exercises can be done with a help of a professional coach and as a stand-alone practices that can be adopted in your daily life.
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