For Excellence, Work Your Natural Talents With the Strengths Finder
The Gallup Organization’s Strengths Finder 2.0 is a valuable assessment tool for individual personal and professional growth and for team development. Karla Brandau routinely uses it in Workplace Power Institute workshops and training programs for charismatic leadership, professional development curriculum and team training.
Find Your Natural Talents
One of the Gallup organization’s continuing contributions to the world is the admonition to each individual to work from their natural talents to attain excellence.
Have you found your natural talents? Does the work you do every day permit you to use your natural talents? If not, start the search for your natural talents today. I recommend taking the Gallup organization’s Strength Finder 2.0. It is enlightening as it helps you identify your natural talents and seek a job position that permits you to use them.
Natural talents are identified in behaviors or tasks that are easy for you or that take minimum effort for you to gain maximum exposure in a crowded field of competitors. If you are having FUN while producing an excellent product, you are probably working from your natural talents.
As an example of natural talents, let’s take an example from my life. I like to sing, but no matter how much I studied music, practiced scales, worked to master vocal techniques, or how much money I spend on vocal lessons, I never achieved the skill level to belt out the Star Spangled Banner like Whitney Houston or sing How Great Thou Art like Carrie Underwood. I was not born with those vocal chords or the natural talent to achieve the professional level of singer and entertainer.
Perhaps you have had a similar experience.
People who work from their natural talents produce amazing results. Bing Crosby whose songs my mother would sing when I was a child, never learned to read music. He depended on his natural ability to hear a melody and memorize it — immediately. Combine this memorization ability with his God-given gift of velvety vocal chords and you get a performer who was a favorite in the radio world from 1934 to 1954. What would Christmas be without hearing Bing Crosby sing White Christmas?
Another lesson in natural talents recently unfolded at the Masters in Augusta. Bubba Watson won the coveted green jacket with what sports writers call “his eccentric style and homemade swing.” Sports writers say he plays by feel, never having paid for a formal coach and never over analyzing or micro-analyzing a single swing.
It is worth the search for your natural talents because when you find them, when you do what you love and what comes easy to you, you provide excellence for your employer and you are happier at work…and in life.
Participate in the Conversation
Inspire all of us. Leave your comments below about how you use your natural talents to do excellent work. Tell us if you have taken the Strengths Finder 2.0 and how it has affected your level of excellence.
Bring Karla To Your Company
To bring a Strengths Finder 2.0 in your company or government agency, contact Karla Brandau at Workplace Power Institute with the convenient form below.