You already have much of the information inside of you to figure out your strengths…because they are…well… your strengths. They are already there, it’s just sometimes they are not obvious to you.
The goal of this exercise is to help you pull out the hints and clues in a quantifiable way.
Getting Started
Start by listing your past jobs, roles, volunteer work or even unpaid significant personal projects or roles. Get as many down as you possibly can from your entire lifetime.
It doesn’t matter what order or how you write them down (remember we don’t care about whether it’s bullet points, sentences, on the back of your hand, it does matter how!) Trust the process and don’t worry about how. Just do it any way that is comfortable for you!
Next, pick any of the jobs or projects you listed. List both the things you were good at AND separately the things you really enjoyed about the job.
Once you have that one done. Pick another one and do the same thing. Again don’t worry about categorizing or filtering at this point. Just get it down. Keep repeating this process until you have gone through each job, role or project that you have above.
Now that you have a list, do you notice any themes or patterns yet? Go back and look at both lists, what you enjoyed AND what you wrote that you’re great at!
Write down those themes!
Getting a Deeper Understanding
Now that you have several lists put together and some themes and patterns, I want you to push it a little bit further.
Take one of those themes of things you enjoy OR are good at and ask yourself, “why am I good at that? Or why do I enjoy that?” You will have to think about it and then once you have your answer, ask “why?” again. Do this until you either can’t answer why anymore OR you have done that 5 times.
This will often give you your root strengths or some serious clues as to what strengths you may have.
Summary of Actions to take:
- List out all your past jobs and roles
- What are the 2-4 things you most enjoyed about each of those
- Answer the questions “What was it specifically that you enjoyed?” and “Why did you enjoy that part so much?”
- Use the 5 Whys to drill down to the root