How to love what you do – and do more of what you love.
Does your life follow you around?
Do you wonder why you enjoy doing some things and not others?
Our lives tend to follow us around, like a shadow. Our talents and strengths tend to follow us around, too. Those things that we do naturally well just keep showing up in what we do, even when we’ve forgotten about them or taken them for granted.
Over 20 years ago I started a little design business and grew it into a design and marketing agency, where I identified the part I loved the most about my job was the interaction with clients, winning the work and throwing it over the fence for the team to do. What I loved most about spending time with clients was listening to their problems and finding a way to solve them. People's problems (let’s use the word ‘challenges’) tend to follow them around, and how we do anything is how we do everything, so my conversations with clients soon morphed into sales challenges, management challenges, human resources challenges, life challenges, relationship challenges, and before I knew it, everything was on the table for discussion.
My calling was starting to bubble to the surface, so I dove deeper into personal development, learnt how to coach and facilitate, and was introduced to a bunch of great tools including Gallup’s StrengthsFinder Assessment (now known as CliftonStrengths).
This tool helps us to identify our natural talents and strengths, and then how to use them to do more of our best work – to be more successful in our career and life. In relationships, too. I like to think of them as our superpowers for success because we can identify them, refine them, practice and explore them and turn them into strengths.
Over 24 million people have taken the survey so far, and decades of research shows that people who use their strengths are 6 times more engaged and productive at work, and 3 times more likely than others to have an excellent quality of life. In fact, organisations that invest in strengths-based development achieve as much as a 29% increase in profit. Research also suggests that just one disengaged employee can affect up to 15 other employees in the same workplace.
One of the best ways to end up in the kind of career that earns us respect, recognition, success and happiness is to do more of what we’re good at.
So how can we do what we love and do more of it? There are five key steps that we work through with our clients.
1. Identify what you love doing.
What you love doing is most likely the thing that you’re naturally good at. Remember, people who use their strengths are 3 times more likely than others to have an excellent quality of life. You can identify the things you’re naturally good at by taking the CliftonStrengths survey. Without taking the survey, there’s a really fun exercise we do in our workshops, called Stand Up If You’ve Got Talent.
Take a minute to answer the following questions, and with each question that you answer ‘yes’, ask yourself why.
Do you start conversations in elevators, shopping queues, aeroplanes, where ever you go?
Do you obey the pedestrian crossing and only cross when the crossing light is green?
Do you have friends from way back in school?
Do you organise your wardrobe by colour, size, season or some other method?
Do you press the elevator button repeatedly?
Is everything a race and a competition for you?
Are you sceptical, need black and white data to make decisions?
Do you make quick decisions, impatient with too much theory and love to take action? Leaping before looking?
Do you write a list of things to do, and stick to it?
Do you go back and add things to your list, just so that you can tick them off?
These are all clues to your natural talents and behaviours.
There’s an interactive exercise on our website and you can submit your answers to us to find out what they mean. Click the button below and check it out.
2. Look for the moments when you are in flow.
When do you lose track of time? Time melts away when we are doing something we are engaged in and enjoy. Maybe it’s one or more of these:
Gardening
Problem-solving
Proofreading
Creating
Arranging
Communicating
Building relationships
Getting things started
Closing deals
Selling
Presenting and facilitating
Teaching
Storytelling
Reconciling
Take a moment and think about those things that you do when time melts away for you.
3. Identify why you love doing it.
Ask yourself:
Why am I engaged in it?
Why do I get a kick out of it?
What are the benefits to myself and others?
What feelings do I get from it?
What feedback do I get from others? When do people around me say things like “wow, how did you do that?”
For me, it’s when I see others have moments of learning – aha moments, breakthroughs and wins. This energises me and drives me to do more of it.
4. Apply those talents to the things that you must do.
We all have daily tasks that we ‘must’ do, and they’re a lot easier when we know how we work with the least resistance. When you know how you do things with the least resistance, naturally, then you can use those to get the ‘must do’ tasks out of the way.
For example, I don’t enjoy long, methodical writing that requires multiple drafts, but I know that to get to the flow of teaching and coaching, I need to create refined content and programs. So, I get into creative mode, arrange and clear my environment of distractions, reward my efforts by using an app and incentives and doing short bursts of focussed activity. Then if needed, I do a deal with somebody who has a talent for editing and who can use my talents to benefit them – a contra if you like.
5. Learn how to create more opportunities to do what you love.
Now that you know what you LOVE doing, let’s make more time for that. The trick is to prioritise the work that energises you and make space for it - and ask for that space from your team and your manager, if you need to.
There's an exercise from Gallup that we use called The Best Of Us.
It's about identifying 4 things that you can share with your teams and your manager so that you get to do more of what you love, and hence more of your best work. It helps team members and leaders to appreciate how people think, feel, and behave differently, how they like to work, what they dislike, and what they appreciate most. Leaders begin to understand each team member as an individual and how to help them flourish within the setting they prefer.
Warning! This might mean changing responsibilities, roles, employers or perhaps starting a side gig.
If you’ve come this far, then by now you should have an idea about what you love doing, why you love doing it, when you’re in flow and how to approach the things that you must do. What’s next you ask? Well, let’s find out what strengths are and start doing more of what you love.
Ready to discover your strengths and start doing more of what you love to do? Get in touch today.
Image by @rizmooney on unsplash.com