Do you know your unique talents?

Happier YOU with Amy?Letter:?Your?Unique Talents

Happy Friday! On this side of the earth, my neighborhood has been adorned with Easter's bunnies and spring flowers and I hope you had the opportunity to observe the little wonders the new season offers.?

In today's Happier YOU Letter, I want to talk about Unique Talents, the very source of our elegant success and?authentic happiness, as this is among the very key topics I work often with my clients. I hope you can benefit from understanding about this key lever to peak performance to use at home and at work.

We are often told that only certain people, like Albert Einstein or Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, are genius and talented. Yet, the truth is each person is endowed with a very unique talent set. We are also convinced that if one doesn't really perform in her job however hard she tries, it's because she is not capable enough. Yet this is so wrong. What is true is she is not in a job that aligns with how her brain is naturally wired in terms of approaching problem solving.

So what is your unique talent set??

It is the?combination?of your?prominent characteristics / personality / qualities?that you are?naturally endowed?with AND your very own way of?approaching problem solving?including how you are?naturally wired?for the key steps in that problem solving process, which gives you the?aptitude?for and?enjoyment?of certain activities.

Psychologist Angela Duckworth acknowledges?the existence of natural abilities. According to Tom Rath,?StrengthsFinder 2.0,?talent?is?a natural way of thinking, feeling or behaving, and when talent is combined with investment of time to practice, it becomes your strength.?

Similarly, psychologist Dean Keith Simonton says talent is a "package of personal characteristics" that helps you?acquire expertise or enhance your performance quickly. This means when you perform a task that taps into your talents, you will be able to faster gain mastery and reach peak performance, compared with those who operate with their talents that don’t align with the same task. Of course, they may still get the results you enjoy but with a lot more time and efforts. This also means if you spend the same amount of energy, time, and focus as they do, you are always ahead.

You may have been utilizing your talents for some time, but because your talents are so natural to you, you often can’t see them. In my?Happiness Infinity Method, we look at multiple high-quality data points to see your strength patterns which then help us uncover your talents. Even with those who are highly self-aware, they still find other aspects of themselves in this Hi! Zone that bring them deep insights which they have never known about and they also see?why they are who they are?and the?connection?between that why and the multiple aspects of their talent set.?

Your talents inform that you have the potential to be great at something, and in order to be truly great at it, you need to put in hard work. This means, even when you have been using your talent set or some aspects of it, once you can articulate it holistically, you have the advantage of knowing your superpowers in order to fully tap into them for peak performance and true success. In the other words, you can always be ahead of the game, elegantly, without having to sweating yourself too much by leveraging your superpowers.

Now you know one of the top secrets to successful?career pivot,?peak performance and happy success in general. And what's next?

For a happier YOU:

The Happiness Infinity process is an intensive one. It often takes my clients?2-3 weeks for deep personal reflection with questionnaire and tests, covering everything talents, passion, values and purpose, with the key events that shape who they are, since childhood.

Then, we sit down together and have a Happiness Infinity Zone Deep Dive that often lasts from two to three hours with the end results including a Talent Statement. When we reach this goal, my clients often share that?the whole exercise and review with me are like a mirror for them to see themselves so clearly and holistically.

And from there, they start to step into their superpowers. What this means is they are confident to create a business, to ask for that promotion they are not sure if they deserve, to redesign their work so it aligns better with their strengths leading to happy peak performance, and to move into a very different career path they never think they are made for or simply realize they are actually a good fit for a?job they have been eyeing for a while and go for it.

If you are curious to uncover your unique talents but you are also confused about the dozens of tests out there, here are the ones I ask my clients to take. The top three are my most favorite:

1. Enneagram
2. Strengths Finder
3. Kolbe A
4. DISC
5. VIA Character Strengths
6. MBTI

But remember taking the tests is just the start. What's important is:

1. How you relate to the result of each test.
2. Whether you see the patterns across the results.
3. How you see the patterns connect with each other to create that set.?
4. Where these patterns come from ("the root").
5. Whether you really "feel" them and see how you will fully use them.

I hope to cover more on this crucial topic in my upcoming Happier YOU Letter.

With anticipated joy from cooking "pho bo" for dinner tonight,?

Onwards to Happiness Infinity,

Amy Nguyen

P. S. If you love this newsletter and think your friends may benefit from it, I'd like to invite you to spread happiness and share?this subscription link?with them.

Photos: Here are the two photos that evoked my thoughts and inspired me to write short posts on social media, from?LinkedIn?to?Instagram?this week.

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