Finding your Safety Leadership Strengths

What are Safety Leadership Strengths?

One of the wonderful things about the Safety world is that we have almost limitless opportunities. ?There are so many things that we can do, especially when it comes to our Safety Leadership careers. However, this great blessing of flexibility can also be a curse. ?Most of us struggle with figuring out where to best focus our attention. This can result in wasted time and energy if a person jumps from career to career.?Personally, it has been something in my journey to finally understand who I was and focused on my Safety leadership strengths.?When I use the word strength, I have a very specific definition.?A safety leadership strength, as I'll use the term in this article, is made up of three things: your gifts, your passion, and your skills.

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1. Your gifts are the talents that have come naturally to you from the beginning, almost from birth.?These are usually areas where you do better than other people that have always seemed effortless to you.
2. The next part of a strength is what I call passion.?Meaning, something you truly love doing.?This is the kind of work that, when you do it, time flies by because you're having so much fun.
3. And finally, skills.?Your skills represent the knowledge and capability that you've acquired over time.?Skills can come from education, mentorship, or on-the-job training.

Think of one person you know who is both happy and successful in their career.?Almost always, they have a natural gift (talent) for what they do, they love doing it (passion), and they have also worked hard and studied to improve their skills (knowledge) over time.?This all means that they've found their strength, and they are using it in a way the world market finds valuable.?Throughout this article, I'll invite you to take notes so this can help you discover your strengths.?Now, let's get started.

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Your gifts

So, the first step to discovering your strengths is to understand your gifts.?Your gifts are the things that come naturally to you.? They've always been there and are a part of your personality.?Sometimes these gifts show up earlier in life, and sometimes they appear much later as a pleasant surprise, through some life experiences you had or will have.?Whatever your gifts are, we invite you to identify and understand them.?Making your gifts powerful will give you the greatest amount of growth in the shortest amount of time.?To make this process easier for you, we enter into inner thoughts by answering the following questions by yourself, then ask someone you trust the same questions and finally you will compare the answers (just write down the first thing that comes to mind, don't overthink your response, and yes do write it down):

1.?????What comes easily to you? (Think about the first thing that comes to mind).

2.?????What tasks take little effort on your part? (Write your response down).

3.?????When you were younger (under the age of 10 or so)

• What sort of things came easily to you? (Think about the things you just naturally took to back then and write down your answers)
• What are the areas where you've received awards, won contests, or received public praise? (Recognition like this is an outside validation of what your gifts may be.?Write your answers down.?

4.?????What are the areas where others have said, "I wish I could do that as well as you"??(Of course, when you give the same question to someone else, they'll give their answer to this question)?Can you remember someone saying this to you? And what did they say it about?

5.?????Next, if you've taken any kind of personality or strengths assessment before, write down what you discovered about yourself in this row. If not, you can skip this question.

Finally, take some time for quiet introspection about you as a Safety Leader.?Just ponder for five minutes.?That means do nothing else but sit, think, and focus on this question: What are your natural gifts to stay safe and keep others safe around you? Set a timer for yourself for ⑤ minutes, and quietly think about that.?

After the time is up, write down your answer.?This quiet introspection is an invitation to slow down and remember something about yourself that you may have forgotten.?With your answers to these questions written down, you're ready to move on to receiving feedback about your gifts from another person who can share what gifts they see about you.

Your passion

Now it's time to determine your loves, the kind of work you're most passionate about.?This is the second element to discover your safety leadership strength.?Remember that your passion is linked to those things that you love doing so much that time flies without noticing because you are having so much fun doing that.?

To discover your passion, we invite you to explore the following questions:

1.?????What do you like to do in your free time? Think of the things they do outside of work and write them out.

2.?????What topics do you seem to enjoy talking about? ?Think about the last time you engaged in a conversation about a topic and before you knew it few hours passed by and you did not even notice.?Write that down here.

3.?????If someone is observing your work and living areas, what sorts of pictures do you keep around them? (What trinkets or objects do you have?) Write down anything you see, because these things are clues about what you really care about the most.

4.?????Next, in a work-related context, what are the things about your job that you love? ?Think about activities that you would volunteer to do repeatedly and write any kind of work that you've seen them excited about doing.

5.?????And finally, it's time for you to make a judgment call. If you were to guess about what kind of work you would enjoy, what would you say? Please don't write I don't know. Give it your best shot and write down at least one thing you believe this person would love to do as a career.

After you've completed these answers, you can share the same questions to a friend and they'll use it in determining what they think your passions are. ?When you think about Safety Leadership, your passion can help you embody and convey a powerful message to people to by help change their believes about safety when they see you loving to do while integrating your passion for safety when performing all decisions at work. ?Remember, you can return the favor and help them discover what they love.

Your skills

Recognizing your skills is the next step, after you discovered your natural gifts and uncovered what you love to do. It's now time to determine your skills, what you've been trained to do. ?In a variety of ways, all of us are educated throughout our lives to improve our skills. While school provides some skills training, it's not the only source. ?Family members, friends, mentors, and courses just like this one also provide skills training. Every job that you've had has given you some on-the-job training. ?We need to list all of these learning experiences. ?To make this process easy for you, we invite you to answer a few questions yourself and then you can invite someone else respond to similar questions about you, without seeing what you responded.

For all questions, remember to just write down the first thing that comes to mind. Don't overthink your response, and please do write it down.

1.?????The first question is, what did you focus on in your education? If you went to college, what was your major? What was your minor? If you attended a trade school, what trade did you learn? List all of that here.

2.?????What careers were you exposed to while growing up? The influence of your parents may have affected you in ways you didn't appreciate when you were younger. ?You can see the combination of those influences and write down anything that comes to mind.

3.?????Who have your mentors been? Mentors can have a significant impact on your skills, perception, and understanding because you look to them as an example. List a few of these mentors and what careers they've had.?

4.?????What positions have you held in the past? List the most influential jobs you've had and list a skill or two you've learned from each career experience.

5.?????What do you study or read about in your spare time? Think about the magazines you subscribe to, the books you enjoy, the blogs you visit, or the podcasts you listen to. Self-directed learning like this is sometimes the most powerful when it comes to skills development. Write it down.

6.?????What additional training have you received? For instance, which online courses have you completed? Maybe your work paid for you to attend some seminars or perhaps you've gained some skills doing volunteer work. ?Write all of this down. ?With your answers to these questions written down, you're ready to move to receiving feedback about your skills.

Assembling your Safety Leadership Strengths

At last we go to the best part, looking for common threads between the three elements to identify your Safety Leadership Strengths. For example, you list training as a gift, and you love delivering training sessions, and you've had extensive development courses about training, then you are going to circle each of these and draw a line connecting them. This is a likely indicator that you have a strength in training/talent development. So you would list training under you believe my strengths are. You may see phrases that are related to each other that use slightly different words.

Use your best judgment to connect those. For example, you may mention that one of your gifts is accident prevention, and in the loves to prevent people from getting hurt and skills you mentioned coaching people to make better decisions about safety. ?Those are closely related. So you could circle those three, draw a line connecting them, and list proactive safety leadership as one of your strengths.

Now that you have identified your Safety leadership strengths, are you ready to focus on them? More importantly, are you ready to start saying no to trying to overcome your career weaknesses? Scary question, isn't it?

However it's an essential question to consider because whenever you say no to one thing you're saying yes to something else. Rather than trying to compensate for your weaknesses, spend time developing your Safety leadership strengths and make them even stronger than they were before. ?Do this and you'll be happier and more productive keeping everyone safe at work, and in the long run you'll increase your marketplace value.

We are simply suggesting you make an internal commitment. ?Tell yourself that you are going to avoid distracting yourself with less valuable strengths or even weaknesses. Make a choice right now to focus on developing what makes you a more successful Safety Leader. Once you've chosen your area of focus, it's time to explore specific steps you can take to further develop that strength.

Thanks for reading this article, feel free to provide your comments and share with anyone who is seeking to reach their next level as a Safety Leader.

If you want to learn more about this topic, please do not hesitate to contact me at [email protected]?

Is a privilege to have the opportunity to help you reach your maximum Safety Leadership potential!