How to identify and value your superpowers

Strengths Profiling and development are powerful for recognising what energises you and determining how to boost your energy and performance for long-term success. It’s also a great way to proactively seek personal and professional opportunities that are more aligned with who you are and how you want to live.

As kids, we’re all about finding superpowers, playing to our strengths, and testing what we’re capable of. Somewhere along our journey to adulthood, we begin losing our courage, self-doubt kicks in, and we can start playing a smaller game. Sometimes it’s helpful but mostly it is not.

"Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much" - Helen Keller

We all want to make a difference to someone or something. This leads to craving two things – connection and purpose. Both need to be aligned with our values and strengths because it is the combination of these that fuels our passion, energy, and performance.

I regularly work with leaders who are at a crossroads in their careers, they’re respected experts in their field, exceptionally clever, successful, and want something more than an executive title. They want to create and leave a positive legacy and be energised by the work to achieve it.

One of the most important questions I ask is ‘What problems do you love solving?’ This is usually met with a long silent pause.

It’s rare to be asked so pointedly about problems when you’re an outcomes-focused person, but the answer helps reveal people’s superpowers or strengths. It also facilitates deeper discussion on why they love those problems, the skills they use, and how they might like to use their strengths more often to achieve a greater sense of fulfilment and joy.

If you’re stuck in a role that isn’t using your strengths and feel that your ability to achieve your goals is being constrained, you’re not going to be happy. No one wants to feel trapped and unable to make the most of their skills!

“The most common realised strength in the world is pride” - Cappfinity Global Research

How we work must align with who we want to be, how we want to live, and what we want to achieve. When our actions aren’t aligned with this, things feel forced and inauthentic. The fancy term for this is cognitive dissonance or disconnection where our emotions and beliefs don’t match our actions or what we signed up for. When we experience this for too long, we begin losing sight of our value, can’t link our passion with purpose, become disengaged, and burn out.

The magic lies in understanding our strengths and mitigating our weaknesses so that we can energetically live with meaning.

The benefits of strengths

Cappfinity is the world leader in measuring and developing potential in Talent Acquisition & Talent Management. Their strengths profiling tool has helped millions of people across the globe identify their realised strengths, unrealised strengths, learned behaviours and weaknesses based on the performance, energy, and use of 60 skills.

What I love about Cappfinity's Strengths Profile is that it identifies what skills light people up and highlights untapped potential and areas of opportunity that may not have been considered. When it comes to developing strengths, individuals are in control, and the benefits are significant. Research has shown that:

• Individuals are six times more engaged and benefit from a 36% performance increase. They also have increased resilience, confidence and goal achievement.
• Employers benefit from a 50% increase in employee retention and a 44% increase in customer satisfaction. Productivity, communication, delegation, and creativity are also increased as people are empowered to leverage their strengths for the collective good.
• Educators who identify and help develop students’ strengths, find that students are 30x more engaged and excited about their future and that they can better articulate their strengths in resumes and interviews.

Three things to boost your superpowers

1)????? Identify the problems you enjoy solving and the things you love creating,

2)????? Examine what makes your effort fun and rewarding, these are your strengths,

3)????? Explore what strengths you’d like to use more in your everyday life.

I provide Cappfinity Strengths Profiling and workshops for leaders and teams.

“Melanie was recommended to me by a performance coach to help me in a transitional phase in my career. I completed a strength profile that separated?my personal attributes into strengths, weaknesses and learned behaviours. The document created which was personalised to me was very informative. However, meeting with Melanie made the process highly worthwhile as not only was she able to explain what these attributes are, but also why my attributes?were distributed?in such a way, and what that meant for my current circumstances. She also gave me practical?tips on how to use my strengths to help with my career transition. Melanie was very friendly, approachable and helpful, and I would highly recommend her service to anyone looking to upgrade their professional or personal lives.” ?– Lachlan Coleman, Cardiac Sonographer and Business Owner.

Contact me at +61 407 004 352 or book a time to arrange yours.

For your outcomes,

Melanie

Bibliography:

Peláez, M. J., Coo, C., & Salanova, M. (2019). Facilitating Work Engagement and Performance Through Strengths-Based Micro-coaching: A Controlled Trial Study. Journal of Happiness Studies, 1-20.

Merritt, S., Huber, K., & Bartkoski, T. (2019). Application of signature strengths at work: A dual-level analysis. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 14(1), 113-124.

Linley, A. & Bateman, T. (2018). The Strengths Profile Book – Finding what you can do + Love to do and why it matters.

https://cappfinity.com