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Discover Your Talents and Use Them to Make Money

Discovering our natural talents can be quite difficult. This is why there are experts whose work is discovering the talents of other people. One of them is Luther Ragsdale, talent researcher and real estate coach who offers three key ways through which you can discover your talents.

Discover your talents

I hope that they will be sufficiently interesting for you and will help you discover tour real talents because each of us possesses them.

What you admired as a child?

Take two minutes and remind yourself of your happiest memories of primary school and give an answer to the question: What made those moments so pleasant? What was the common thread?

For example, were you highly competitive at age of nine? Maybe you liked football and each day were just waiting to finish school so could go out and play. You lived for those moments. You cherished that moment when you could go out on the field for football and start to compete.

Or maybe you enjoy working on large, competitive, team-oriented projects? Your friends wanted you to be in their group. You had the talent to push your team to go further. You feasted on such opportunities. It was amazing.

Furthermore, as you think about these childhood memories, think and on similar actions, you admire as an adult. Why? Because you might still be highly competitive, but now you are competing to win new business ventures for your company or maybe you still want complex, strategic projects, but now you do it for an international consulting firm.

The question is why we make certain choices and enjoy certain activities? Why are we better at some things than others? In view of this issue, Ragsdale speaks of ‘the talent theme’ which, as he says, is a naturally recurring pattern of thought, feeling or behavior that can be productively applied. Furthermore, understanding your unique talents gives you answers to these questions. Your unique talents show you why you make certain choices, enjoy specific activities and are better at some things than others.

The conclusion is to understand that what you admired while you were a student and what impresses you as adults are actually very similar things. Only you use your talent themes in different environments. In other words, which of today’s tasks remind you the most of the joy that you had 20 or 30 years ago? Find a way how to move your work today in a direction of what you admired yesterday. School memories are powerful stories that reveal what your talents are and how to use them properly.

What makes you lose track of time?

Imagine it is Saturday morning, 09:00 am. You are free, virtually without any obligations and you have several free hours on your calendar.

You start the day with your favorite activity. Maybe playing guitar, running, working around the garden or writing a novel. Or maybe do some coding. This activity, no matter which one, it pulls like a vacuum cleaner. Your mind, body, and intuition begin to work in perfect symmetry. You lose track of time. Before you know, it’s 12:30 pm and you still have not even thought of having a breakfast.

And what if your job is just as satisfying as your weekend morning project? Is it even possible to capture and use that kind of magic? If YES, then pay very close attention to such moments. If you’re so much seized with an activity that you lose track of time, you are experiencing one of the main symptoms of flow. And if experiencing any quantity of flow in a project, you also likely exploit one or more of your natural talents.

What do you long for?

The third key point, Ragsdale begins explaining with the question: What fire is burning inside of you at this point? Never before in the history of humankind, was easier to start fulfilling your life’s mission.

Do you want to blog? Cool. Start a blog.

You know how to knit? Super. Make a few extra scarves and start selling.

Does even the thought of meeting and connecting with new people sent you into a state of extreme happiness? Great. Launch a meeting place for local executives in your city.

Do you enjoy doing all three things? Even better. Start a monthly meeting for bloggers who are experts in knitting scarves.

In the perfect world, everyone will use their strengths to work each day. Unfortunately, that is not the case with most people. In fact, that says 63% of workers worldwide are not engaged in their work. This does not include that 24 % who are actively disengaged.

Although there are several reasons for this, one of the key factors is that most employees do not use their natural talents to work on a daily basis. They are not able to do the things for which they are created, on a daily basis.

Or, in other words: What is it that you are longing for?

If you find yourself in a workplace where you do not use your skills or talents, it can be painful and uncomfortable. Fortunately, life is a journey, not an isolated day. Find at least one small way to start again to conquer some of the joys you have when you were younger. Get lost in your favorite activity, lose track of time on a Saturday morning. Think well about what you are longing for and start doing it.


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