Are you a high performer working out of your weakness?
High performers know what it takes to deliver results. They consistently impact their organization’s goals. And while it can be a thrill knowing they are adding value, in the long-run, if they aren’t working out of their strengths, they eventually burn out, feel disconnected from their work, or just have a longing for something more.
To understand why this happens, it is important to understand the difference between strengths and performance.
A strength, as defined by Gallup, is any activity that strengthens you. And a weakness is any activity that weakens you, even if you’re good at it. For some, it’s hard to distinguish between something you are good at and something that strengthens you.
A few clues that something is a strength:
Before you do something, you find yourself looking forward to it.
While you’re doing it, time seems to speed up. You lose yourself in it. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls this “flow.”
You experience such rapid learning, you want to do it again. You aren’t drained, you are energized.
How can you get in touch with what your strengths are?
You are the BEST judge of your strengths. No one else can tell you what strengthens you. And sometimes we are cut off from it because of the demands of life around us. It can happen in school, as we focus on performance and achievement, or even within our families if we are living someone else's version of our life.
The good news is, unlike skills, your strengths have been present with you going a long way back. You were using them naturally when you were young. Let me take you back in time. What did you love to do when you were 6 years old?
One of my clients used to love building model trains and villages. He loved watching the wires and the cables generate colored lights. He created a career as an engineer where he pursued deep technical expertise in the technologies he worked with.
Are you starting to see how this works? What is coming to mind for you as you ponder this question of what you loved when you were young? This has likely been present for you throughout your entire life. It is your career throughline.
Another way to take a deeper look at what strengthens you is by conducting an energy audit. On a piece of paper, write down the people, habits, places, thoughts, and projects that energize you, and in the next column, the ones that drain you of energy.
Adopt this as a recurring practice, perhaps quarterly, and you will be much more attentive to the things that give you energy. What gives you energy is another signpost to where your strengths lie.
Early in your career, the number of things in your work that drain you of energy may outweigh the things that energize you. You can sustain this for a short time, but in the long-run, you will want to position yourself to take opportunities that will utilize what energizes and strengthens you.
You can begin to ask “what can I do in my current role to work in the ways that strengthen me?”
At first, it sounds contradictory that your strengths are not necessarily the same as what you are good at. What you are good at vs. what you’re not good at is your performance. And unlike strengths, someone else is the best judge of that.
Remember, you are the best judge of what strengthens you.
There is a compelling case to focus on what you are good at, because employers like you to perform well and deliver results. Gay Hendricks, the author of The Big Leap, calls this your “Zone of Excellence.” You can make a great career by staying in your Zone of Excellence. It pays well, because your skills are meeting a need. The only problem with staying here is that it keeps you from working in your “Zone of Genius.” You lack that state of flow in your work. And flow is energizing.
Hendricks describes the Zone of Genius, that top right hand quadrant, as the set of activities that draw upon your special gifts and strengths that you are uniquely suited to do, the things that come naturally to you. And when you work on this skill consistently, the combination of natural talent and repetitive practice can begin to distinguish you. When you’re in your Zone of Genius, work feels effortless because you are in a state of flow.
If one day you wake up and you realize that you are working in your Zone of Excellence and not your Zone of Genius, listen for the voice of possibility calling to you. “I wonder how I can do more of the things that energize me at work?” If you’re working in your Zone of Genius 10 percent of the time, how can you increase that to 20 percent?
According to Gallup, only 20 percent of us build a life where we play to our strengths. Possibility asks, “how can I create a career where I’m in my Zone of Genius most of the time?”
