SUCCESS: THE RIGHT SEAT ON THE RIGHT BUS

develop strengths rather than working at improving weakness

Your personal coping patterns are a highly specialized combination of fight and flight predispositions.  Some succeed by confronting life’s challenges head on, others achieve because they go with the flow and know how to stay out of harm’s way.  There doesn’t appear to be a single best strategy—so what is the secret to success?

There is mounting evidence that developing traits and interests that were evident during your early childhood play a key role in  adult success and satisfaction.  This process builds on natural strengths.  Greeks called a person’s unique pattern of success a daimon.  Romans referred to it as one’s genius.  Following this line of reasoning, the odds of performance problems and dissatisfaction  increase if you stray from your natural calling.  The self-help industry feeds on the opposite perspective.  They entice you to target on what’s wrong (your faults) and  provide a plethora of one size fits all solutions.

The belief that  what has worked for others will work for you is a false assumption.  People  spend millions of dollars on self help aids that seldom work.  Over seventy five percent of self help books, tapes, and exercise equipment sits unused.  It appears that the mere act of taking delivery of an improvement tool is sufficient to satisfy the “need to improve” tension in many people. 

Winners discover then develop their strength—they make better use of what comes naturally, rather than working to improve faults.  People can learn skills that do not come naturally, but their ROI in terms of results and satisfaction are disappointing. 

 According to the Center for Sales Strategy, talent is what God put in that just oozes out of you—skill by contrast is developed by hard work.  If you were to assume that a ten percent improvement could be achieved by developing your skill in an area of lesser strength, that same energy applied to your natural talent would produce 10 times the results (not 10%).  That’s why CSS helps clients focus on “Turning talent into performance”.  Mediocre sales talent is destined to achieve mediocre results regardless of development efforts.  Are you making good use of your daimon/genius? 

 How to make the most of natural talent:

• Talk to parents and others who knew you as a child.
• Rediscover your childhood interests—what turned your crank before adult inhibitions set in.
• Find ways of using talents that already exist–avoid depending on areas of lesser stregnths 
• Seek for and develop  careers, hobbies, and relationships that are consistent with your nature.