Embrace Your Gift (Yes, We’re Talking to You)

In my last blog post, I introduced you to the five steps to getting into work you love. To recap, those five steps are…

Step #1 – Know the “real you”.
Step #2 – Embrace the “real you”.
Step #3 – Understand how being the real you will help solve the problems of others.
Step #4 – Find somewhere that will embrace the “real you” (where you don’t have to hide it).
Step #5 – Set an action plan to get from here to there.

This five step process is a great action plan, whether you’re in mid-career looking to find rewarding work, or still in school wanting to know what you want to be when you grow up.

The first step is to know the real you… the one that’s there even when nobody is watching. It’s the “you” when the ego is stripped away. It’s the “you” that shows up naturally and without pretending. It’s who you are deep down inside when you totally love life.

The second step is to embrace the real you. Beth is a great example of how this works…

Beth came to us as a newly married receptionist at a church. Even though Beth was a bubbly person, she was not enthused about her work. So she tried The Clarifier, our process that uncovers a person’s Given Talent.The Clarifier is the process we use to help people find work they love. It starts with a day when you felt completely energized… when time flew by.

Beth’s energizing day was when she was putting together a scrapbook soon after she tragically miscarried her first child. She was heartbroken and wanted to remember the baby with a scrapbook of memories.

As she relived her scrapbooking day, we used our techniques to uncover the particular step by step way of thinking and acting she reverts to when she does anything that energizes her (her Given Talent).

One of the things Beth told us she absolutely loves to flip through magazines looking at each page at lightning speed, and she remembers every page vividly. She said it drives her husband crazy when she does it.

As she stores these pictures in her mind, she perfectly categorizes them like a giant virtual filing cabinet under a particular emotion. They float around in her mind until she’s ready to recall them to produce something that visually depicts an emotion. If you were to meet her, you’d recognize instantly how incredible her gift is.

I asked her if she can do this anywhere. For example, could she make this room “cozy”?

Beth lit up. She said, “Oh, that’s easy. I’d put in this kind of carpet, and those drapes, and that color, and this fabric, and that texture, and this, and that, and this, and that.” She rattled off about 25 things she would do in about ten seconds. It was incredible.

I asked her how she did that, and she nonchalantly said, “Oh, I just take all of these pictures that I store in my head, and I pull them out to represent an emotion I’m trying to reproduce.” Then came the key line…

“But everybody does that, don’t they?”
Are you kidding, Beth? Everybody doesn’t do it that way.

That’s her unique Given Talent. It gives her tons of energy when she uses it. She can’t get enough of it. And because her Given Talent comes so easily and naturally, she falsely believes it’s not the special. Wow!! Nothing could be further from the truth.

That’s the nature of a person’s Given Talent. It’s a gift you’ve been given (and everyone has one). Because it comes so easily for you, you tend to downplay it and not embrace it.

That’s why the second key step is to embrace the real you… the gift you’ve been given. You have a gift, too. Yours will be very different than Beth’s. You just need to know it and embrace it, and that’s a huge step to finding rewarding work.

You may wonder what Beth ended up doing with her career. She now has two beautiful kids, and she decided to be a stay-at-home mom. She opened an online photo studio. If I were to show you to her website, you’d see emotions exuding out of the photos she does. You’d see her Given Talent coming through loud and clear, all because she truly knows herself and embraces that a being her.

If you want to know how much you’re using your Given Talent at work and at home, take our free Reality Check by clicking HERE. It’ll be your first step to finding and embracing the real you, and getting into a career where every day will be one of those days when time flies by like the speed of light.

Have some fun with just being YOU!!

Author:

Dave Dutton – Founder of stuckinarut.com – “Answering the question for all ages, “What do I want to be when I grow up.”