Posts Tagged ‘successful living’

Strengths and Talents plan

Have you identified your strengths and talents? If not check out this great article; it should help you identify them.  After you have completed that task come back here and let’s get to the next step.

Now that we are all on the same page let’s talk about the next big question…. What do we do with this list now?  Here are 4 steps:

1. Determine how they support your life purpose.
2. Establish a baseline of your skills and talents.
3. Set goals for your skills and talents.
4. Create a plan of action for meeting your goals for your skills and talents.

How Your Strengths and talents Support your life purpose

Like I said in the article for determining your strengths and talents, they will likely support you’re your life.  This is because what you enjoy doing is what you are good at, and if you are really good at something, it is for a reason.  If you are spiritual, this is a spiritual truth.  If you are not spiritual, this is pragmatic.  If you believe in only yourself, then believe in what you enjoy.

This step should be easy for you, if you have identified both your life purpose and your strengths and talents correctly.  If your strengths and talents do not further or help you succeed or excel at your life purpose, go back and figure out where you got one or the other wrong.

Establish a baseline of your skills and talents

A baseline is a starting measurement.  Figure out a quantifiable measurement for your talent or strength.  If your talent is juggling, measure how many objects your can juggle and for how long.  Simple example, but it works.  If your talent or strength is not so easily measured you may have to be more creative.  For instance if your writing is your strength or talent, you may have to measure errors per 100 words, or have someone else rate the entertainment value of your writing on a scale of 1-10.  However you do it, figure your baseline.

You’ll use these baseline measurements later.  Depending on the needs of your plan you may take periodic measurements of to see how your progress is on improving your strengths and talents.   That is the point of the baseline giving you a way to tell if you are improving.

Set goals for your skills and talents

How good can you get?  That is what you want to determine.  Your goals should push your talents and strengths to their limit.  You want to get the edge, find your potential.  I suggest both intermediate and end goals.  Intermediate will be steps along the way to your full potential.

Create a Plan for your Talents and Strengths

This plan for meeting the goals you have set for your talents and strengths will be a sub-plan of your larger life purpose plan.  Your life plan, which is the plan you will follow to meet your life purpose, shall contain your baseline and goals for your talents and strengths, and explain how they support your life purpose.  It’s all part of one big happy plan!

Your talents and strengths plan will have activities that you will do to improve your talents and strengths.  Here are some examples:

1. Training for your talents and strengths
2. Practice – hours per week, day, etc.
3. Research and reference material
4. Support groups – like minded people supporting one another
5. Purchase equipment needed to be better

I am sure you can think of other items to add to your plan.  And with all plans, remember that the plan should be updated as new ideas and progress is made.  Plans are fluid and should change as you make progress and life takes you in different directions.

If you found this informative, please Digg it, Stumble it, submit it to Delicious, post it on Facebook, and above all tell a friend. You are our best resource!

Author: Jeff Harris
Copyright © 2010

Identify Your Strengths and Talents

5 Steps for Identifying Your Strengths and Talents

Part of personal development is taking full advantage of your strengths and talents, as discussed in my feature article what is self development. What do you do well and how can you leverage those things to achieve your goals and eventual life purpose? Strengths and talents define us as individuals. Knowing what these are and building them into your personal development plan is critical. Your plan is unique for many reasons and one of them is that your plan must take full advantage of what you are good at doing. This is why two people do not achieve the same goals in the same way.

Look at these two statements and chose the one that best describes yourself:

a) The better I am at something the more I enjoy doing it?
b) The more I enjoy doing something the better I am at doing it.

If you chose ‘a’ then you are likely more motivated by success. Conversely, if you chose ‘b’ you are likely motivated more by happiness. Now, just because you one or the other does not mean that you do not like being happy or successful, it just indicates a preference. You may also find that as your travel through life these things change.

First, make your lists

So, with that information in mind make two lists. Do not spend more than 15 minutes on each list. Organize each list in order of priority to you. Here are the two lists you will create:

a) A list of those things that you do really well.
b) A list of those things that you enjoy doing.

Here are some ideas to help you fill out your list:

• interpersonal skills – how you deal with others
• verbal, written, and communication skills
• dexterous skills – using your hands
• thinking skills – analysis, problem solving, etc
• meticulous and tedious skills
• planning
• spur of the moment or crisis skills
• do you require a lot of time to think or do you typically wing it? How is that working for you
• what would others say you do well?
• What do people count on your for?
• If you could do anything in life what would it be?

Second, combine the lists

Compare the two lists and see how they differ. Was one list easier to develop than the other? Combine the lists and eliminate the duplicates.

Third, identify your top strengths or talents

Pick the top five or six items off the list and note them in your journal. Each day for a week review your daily activities and make a note of how often you use your top items.

Fourth, record and review your week

At the end of the week review the activities. You want to see how often you used your top five or six strengths or talents. If you did not use one or two of them, you need to ask yourself why. Here are some typical reasons why some of your top five or six talents or strengths are not being used:

• Your life at home and work is not lined up with your strengths. Should you make changes to your life like a carrier change?
• Maybe you have the wrong items on the top of the list. Review your list.
• Perhaps it was just an abnormal week. Go for another week and see if the results change.

Fifth, make necessary adjustments

Armed with this new information you can make adjustments. You will do one of three things:

1. Adjust your list,
2. Adjust your job, or
3. Live with the bitter realization that you are not living your life to take advantage of your best strengths and skills. Sounds dreary to me.

Your life purpose is typically tied up with your talents and skills, those that you love to do and those that you are great at. So, if you want to be as successful as possible, and as happy as possible, then you need to build upon your talents and strengths. You need to make them stronger. You need to exercise them often.

If you found this informative, please Digg it, Stumble it, submit it to Delicious, post it on Facebook, and above all tell a friend. You are our best resource!

Author: Jeff Harris
Copyright © 2010

Top 10 Distractions to Success

Self development requires commitment. If commitment was easy to maintain there would be a lot more successful, physically fit, higher educated, and financially independent people in this world. I cannot answer all of the questions about commitment in one article, but let's look at a few distractions in our lives. Here is my list of the top 10 commitment distractions: 1. finances 2. overweight 3. other health issues 4. vacations 5. family disagreements on life direction 6. children 7. spouse or significant other 8. depression 9. boredom 10. life responsibilities

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The unselfishhelp.com Life

I’ve been telling you about finding your life purpose and living your dream. I urge you to look at how you can make changes in your life that take you toward your dream, rather than making choices that conform you to the people around you. Along those lines, I had a wonderful experience under most unlikely circumstances. This weekend I had to take a trip to the Oregon coast. My 21 year old son lives eight hours away from my wife and me, not far from the town of Silverton Oregon. He called me up last Thursday morning and said he was sick. By noon he was being rolled into surgery to have his appendix taken out. It seemed like a good idea for my wife Tracy and I to make the trip to be with him for a couple of days as he recovered. The people at the hospital in Silverton were kind enough to find us a place to stay, just a few blocks from the hospital. They arranged for us to stay in a ‘bed and breakfast’ (B&B).

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Listen to Your Heart – Believe in Yourself

That teacher gave me no hope and yet I did not give up. Why did she not support me? This is a great example of those people I talk about in my article Why Goal Setting Fails and How to Succeed.Rather than give me a list of practical ideas and tools for improving my writing she said I should find something else to do in life. In her defense, she learned writing the same way she was trying to teach me and the rest of her students to write. She sat in a classroom, followed the teacher’s direction, learned the rules, and followed them mechanically. I don’t know, but I would not be surprised to learn that she was not that great of a writer herself. I say that because she only saw the rules, never the art, and there are many things in life that are both an ‘art and a science’. Writing is one of those things.

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