What Are Your Natural Talents and Abilities? (Article 4)
Knowing what you do best--what your strongest natural talents and abilities are--and then finding the work that best fits those talents are fundamental to finding success and fulfillment.
By Anne Whitaker, M.S., J.D.
In this series, we have been taking a look at how you can create a career that brings you greater success and satisfaction. Previously, I described how to create a Personal Vision for your career and the importance of considering the Eight Critical Success Factors (See Articles 1, 2 and 3). We examined the first of these success factors in the last article--your Stage of Adult Development. In this segment we will consider the second factor—Your Natural Talents and Abilities. [1]
Each Person Is Born With A Unique Set Of Talents
Every person is born with a unique set of talents that gives them a special ability to perform certain kinds of tasks easily and yet also make other tasks seem laborious. Knowing what you do best--what your strongest natural talents and abilities are and how you are “hard-wired”--and then finding the work that best fits those talents are fundamental to finding success and fulfillment. This is the basic groundwork of your Personal Vision, and is the information you need at each of your career Turning Points as you start to decide what you will do with your life.
Do You Know What Your Hard-Wired Talents And Abilities Are?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said it well: “The important thing in life is to have a great aim and to possess the aptitude and the perseverance to attain it.” Do you know what your hard-wired talents and abilities are? I hear many of you saying: Of course I do! Peter Drucker, whom Fortune magazine described as the most prescient business trend spotter of our time, said, “Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong.” I have found this to be true, at least for myself and the people I have coached over the years.
It’s not our fault. This is not something that we learn in school, and it is certainly not something that we discover in the work place. It is very hard to know what your abilities are without an objective assessment tool (we’ll talk more about that later). Furthermore, the focus in our careers is typically on education, skill-building, and training. While important, they are not your innate abilities or aptitudes. Often people confuse the concept of abilities with skills and/or intelligence but they are not the same. Intelligent, highly-motivated people can accomplish many things for which they have little or no natural talent, but they may not be happy or satisfied doing it. I have known many lawyers who have become successful in their practices through education, training and experience and yet are still very dissatisfied with their careers. The missing piece of the puzzle for them was in the abilities area; discovering what their natural abilities were gave them invaluable insight into what was and wasn’t working for them.
Some realized they were in roles that did not allow them to use their strong talents, which was the root of their frustration and boredom. Others learned that they were frustrated and burned-out because their jobs loaded heavily on abilities they did not have. The further you get from fully expressing your talents and abilities, the less likely it is that you will enjoy your day at work.
It Is Important To Know How Your Abilities Combine And Work Together To Influence What You Are Naturally Gifted To Do
So what are natural abilities? They are the inborn talents that are always accessible for you to use, any time and any place. By the time you are 14 or 15 years old, your natural abilities have stabilized and, barring any serious disease or physical injury that affects your brain, they will remain with you, unchanging, for your entire life. You don’t have to practice or even use them regularly to maintain them.
They often drive you into certain kinds of activities. For some people, it’s a gift for music or design, or a talent for theoretical thought. Other’s talents are more generalized, such as managing people, or abilities that make writing or teaching easy. There are certain abilities that are the most powerful and influential talents: The Driving Abilities. These are particularly important to know about because they influence, or drive you, whether they are high or low. In my experience working with lawyers, I have seen many people trace their dissatisfaction at work to having one or more strong Driving Abilities of which they were not aware and for which they had no outlet. It is also important to know how your abilities combine and work together to influence what you are naturally gifted to do.
Classification: One Of The Driving Abilities
Let’s look at one of the Driving Abilities--Classification. This ability employs your right brain to solve problems. Also called inductive reasoning, this type of problem solving consists of your right brain taking unrelated and related facts, observations, and information and arriving at a theory to connect them and explain them. It’s quick, and those with high Classification love to use it--it’s fun for them. On the other hand, it also makes it difficult for them to get along easily with those who have other equally valid, but different ways of solving problems.
To give you an example of how abilities affect our lives, let’s take a look at John, a person with strong Classification ability. John is a junior partner at a law firm. He is described by his co-workers as quick and self-assured. Given a problem to solve, he knows the answer before anyone even has a chance to fully explain the issue. He often starts responding to what people say before they can finish their sentence, and he has an irritating habit of being right and knowing he is right. John also has little patience with people who are slower than he at seeing the answers. He often feels he is waiting for others to catch up and see something that is completely obvious to him already. John is happiest when he is fully engaged by problems coming at him fast and furiously, and is very unhappy when he has nothing new to sink his teeth into. Because he is high in Classification, he doesn’t solve problems logically or in a linear fashion; he solves them with the right hemisphere of his brain--the one that doesn’t put things into language form. He doesn’t necessarily know how he gets to an answer, but just knows what the right answer is. Working with John, junior associates might notice that when they hand him a brief that they have spent days on to perfect, he scans it briefly, remarking only that “I would change the order of the arguments.” John is using his strong Classification and is quickly able to spot a problem with almost anything.
Classification demands to be used--more than any other strong ability. If John was ever stuck in a menial job that required him to do the same thing over and over, he would be very unhappy. He might even create problems for himself, seemingly just to have the opportunity to make use of this powerful ability. On the other hand, people with other problem solving styles must go through a much more laborious process to get to the answer. Those individuals would not thrive in the same type of fast-paced, rapid-fire problem solving environment that John finds so exciting.
Performing In A Way That Works With Your Abilities Will Create More Energy And Leverage Your Talents
Why is it important to know what your abilities are? First, natural abilities affect the ease or difficulty that you experience with certain types of work activities.When a particular task requires a set of abilities that are natural for you, you can perform it in less time, with less effort, and use less energy. On the other hand,when a task requires talents that are not in your make up, you spend more time, put forth more effort, and exert more energy to achieve a similar level of performance. That explains why certain sets of work activities are relatively easy for one person but not another. For John, his strong Classification ability does not predict how well he will perform as a lawyer necessarily but it gives him critical information. Of course he needs to know what his other abilities are and how they interact with one another to get a more complete picture. But he now understands why he enjoys and really needs rapid-fire, fast-paced problem solving and, alternatively, feels drained and frustrated by situations that are more mundane and process-driven.
This does not mean that you should only pursue tasks for which you are naturally gifted. There are other personal factors--the other 6 Success Factors we haven’t touched on yet--that also cause people to undertake work activities for which they don’t have truly natural talent. Your values, goals, family influence, interests, and skills also play an important part. That being said, knowing your talents will help you better manage how you work. There is more than one way to do a job or accomplish a task, and performing in a way that works with your abilities will create more energy and leverage your talents.
Second, you need to know what your abilities are so you can find activity outlets for them. Creating outlets, both on and off the job, can make you feel much better about the work that you do. If John was also strong in Idea Productivity--which is a drive to generate a lot of ideas--and he did not get an opportunity to use that at work, he would need to create ways that he could do so outside of the office or he would feel stifled and frustrated.
Lastly, knowing your talents allows you to communicate your preferences to those with whom you work and live. You are clearer about what is easier and harder for you and you can also appreciate what does and does not come naturally for others. John can now understand why he always feels like he is having to wait for others to “catch up” with him and can develop an appreciation for the fact that others arrive at solutions and decisions in a different but equally valid way.
Jessica Was Dissatisfied And Ready For A Change
It should be clear by now that knowing your natural abilities allows you to readjust your career so that you can work with rather than against your hard-wiring. For an example of this, let’s visit again with Jessica, the lawyer we met in the last two articles. Remember that at 41, Jessica was dissatisfied and ready for a change. A success by all standards, she was not only a partner at a major law firm with a great book of business, but for several years she had been managing partner of the firm. She was working most weekends and many nights during the week. She was generally considered an excellent manager, but felt great stress because she did not enjoy her work anymore. It took her away from her family even more than her practice ever had, but she didn’t know what she could do about it. Her firm needed her in the managing partner role and her family depended on her to work hard and provide financial stability. After taking some time to examine what was important to her, Jessica remembered that she had enjoyed practicing law for a long time after joining the firm but that for the last few years she hadn’t enjoyed her work at all.
As we saw last time, Jessica’s first step in developing a Personal Vision was to understand her Stage of Adult Development and that she was at the Midlife Turning Point. Instead of making a drastic change in her life because she was so unhappy, Jessica slowed down and started searching for her own answers to what would make her happy. In the process of seeking new information about himself, Jessica ran across some material about abilities assessments. On a whim she signed up and went through a battery of tests. For her, one of the most interesting pieces of objective information she learned was that her pattern of natural abilities was very poorly suited for management. Her talent fitted her superbly for law, but management duties went completely against her grain. I should note that understanding your natural talents does not equate to whether you can or cannot perform any role. Because she is intelligent and highly motivated, Jessica performed the role of managing partner extremely well. The problem was that it fell so far outside her pattern of talents that she had to work twice as hard to achieve a result much less satisfying to her personally.
Jessica’s Practice Group Became More Productive And She Brought In More New Business Than Ever. She Was Also Much Happier
Even though the role was dissatisfying and made her work against herself, Jessica could have continued on as managing partner. Her firm certainly wanted her to. But when she realized it was a large part of the reason she was so unhappy with her career, she decided to step down from that role--over the protests of the other partners. Jessica insisted on the change because she knew objectively she was right. She also set priorities for her time and set limits on the amount of time she dedicated to her work. She stopped working late into the evening and every weekend. She found this was easier to do when she concentrated on the kind of work she loved and for which she was best suited.
At first, Jessica’s partners were not wild about this change. However, Jessica’s practice group became more productive over the next several months and she brought in more new business than ever. Also, she was happier and her practice group was happier. The firm found another manager better suited to the role. Of course, Jessica’s decisions were more complex and involved more issues than just abilities. Personality, interests, and family of origin all strongly influenced her actions. But getting objective information about how she was hard-wired was a first big step.
Whether you are mid-career like Jessica or making a first-time choice about a career, it is critical to be absolutely clear about your natural talents when making a career decision. How do you discover what your natural abilities are? It is practically impossible to do on your own, and requires an objective assessment that will give you a more complete picture about areas of high, low and intermediate abilities. Tests for innate abilities are very different from those given for personality and interests. Those assessments are subjective and based on self-reporting measures. I know of only one objective, carefully validated measurement tool for natural abilities--the Highlands Ability Battery. [2] For more information, see Notes below. The test is available online, and you can also arrange to have an individual two-hour feedback session from a specially-trained consultant, which I recommend you do. This assessment can give you critically valuable information about your talents and is the ideal foundation upon which to build your Personal Vision.
Once you have that information, you will be ready to look at the third and fourth Critical Success Factors that form your Personal Vision: your Skills and Interests. We will tackle these two important areas next but for now, checkout how you are hard-wired. You may be surprised!
NOTES: 1. McDonald, Bob, Ph.D., and Hutcheson, Don, E., Don’t Waste Your Talent: The 8 Critical Steps to Discovering What You Do Best, The Highlands Company, 2005. 2. The Highlands Ability Battery-- www.highlandsco.com.
Anne Whitaker is an executive and career coach for legal professionals and has worked with individuals and groups for over 30 years. A former practicing attorney, educator and business owner, Anne combines her legal experience, coach training and expertise, and business acumen to assist her clients in achieving their career and life goals. Anne is also well known for her speaking, writing and facilitating. She has created, chaired and presented more than 20 programs on attorney career development topics for associations, law firms and corporations. Her articles on lawyer career-related topics have appeared in local and national lawyer publications.
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