LEADING FROM YOUR STRENGTHS

We live in an environment that is constantly changing. Downsizing, reorganizing, reengineering, and outsourcing have become household terms. The reaction for the average worker is an endless expanding of their skills in the hope that they can become more marketable in the shifting labour market. Is that the best approach?

That may be a good reaction, but a poor response. Becoming a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none is not what today’s knowledge market requires. It demands depth not breadth, focus not frivolity.

The market is beginning to align itself to the age long philosophy of enduringly successful people. For ages they have deepened, focussed, and played to their strengths while managing their weaknesses. They have found greatness in their strengths, while the populace seeks it in vain by living one long big remedial life of fixing weaknesses.

If you have to specialise, and in these times, you must, your odds of standing out in your industry will be proportional to the degree your specialisation plays to your innate strengths. Strengths, activities you are naturally great at and that leave you feeling energised, is your foundation for greatness.

As the world around us changes, one thing remains constant within—your natural abilities. You may build on them and make the most of them, but you cannot change them. Why then not settle and build on the changeless core instead of chasing after the mirage out there.

Wired a certain way and endowed with specific abilities, you possess the potential of becoming great only in harnessing the core of your strengths—your talents. Fuelling your abilities with your ruling passions, create a masterpiece of what your hands find to do. 

Move from living for the weekend to looking forward to Monday. Live as James Michener remarked when he said, “The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labour and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he’s always doing both.” Live a strong life!