Utilizing Your Talents and Strengths: Their Role in Confidence, Misunderstandings, Work Culture & Energy
Utilizing Your Talents and Strengths: Their Role in Confidence, Misunderstandings, Work Culture & Energy

Utilizing Your Talents and Strengths: Their Role in Confidence, Misunderstandings, Work Culture & Energy

As a rehab professional, how can utilizing your talent themes or strengths increase confidence, decrease misunderstanding and energize you?

TALENTS/STRENGTHS

CliftonStrengths defines strength and talent in the following ways: “A strength is the ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance in a specific activity. Talents are naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied. Talents, knowledge, and skills — along with the time spent (i.e., investment) practicing, developing your skills, and building your knowledge base — combine to create your strengths.”

Role in confidence

Understanding your top 10 talents will allow you to see how you can utilize your talents at work and in your personal life. Once you identify them, look back on your life to see where and how you used each talent. Then look at your current life and determine where & how you can use each talent. Are there certain talents that you would like to develop more? According to CliftonStrengths, investing in developing your top strengths has a better ROI than spending effort on developing weaknesses. 

Going through the process of identifying and understanding your talents will allow you to definitively name what you are naturally good at and will give you assurance. You will also recognize how to utilize them best in your current job as well as how to market yourself for future job opportunities. This self-awareness will boost your confidence.

Role in misunderstandings

Most people believe a talent or strength is all positive, right? Hmmm…wrong. While natural talents and strengths can be used for good, they can also be used with the wrong motives or misunderstood. For instance, if you have the talent theme of “Restorative”, you are likely to enjoy finding problems and developing the solutions to resuscitate a system, program or project. You like to take something and make it better. However, this desire of yours can be misunderstood as criticism to the current model or process. So, as you prepare to present your ideas, you may need to point out the positives in the current model and appreciate them as well as cast a vision of where the project can be taken before suggesting ideas for improvements. These ideas will prevent others from misunderstanding your intentions (criticism of the current vs your desire to make something great).

Understanding your talents themes and your self-awareness of how common misunderstandings around that talent may be exhibited through you can produce a more positive team culture. And when everyone on your team understands and appreciates the talents others bring to the team, everyone wins.

Role in energy level

If you spend most of your day having to work from your bottom 10 of the 34 talent themes, you will find yourself drained. Yes, if one of your bottom themes is “Developer”, you are perfectly capable of carrying out tasks that require this talent, but it will be taxing. But, if you utilize many of your top 10 talent themes throughout the day, you will be energized.

As a clinician, where are you able to utilize and build upon your strengths and talents? Are there ways of carving out more time throughout the day to utilize your talents in creative ways? Perhaps a special project? Or research? Perhaps you can even feed some talents outside of work. Maybe you find you aren’t able to utilize your top talents in your current role and may need to change jobs. Once you identify and utilize your talents, you will see how your energy level is positively impacted, which will ultimately decrease those feelings of stress and burnout as well.

Role in Work Culture

As a clinic owner and rehab manager, how can you help your staff understand and utilize their strengths? How can you strategically draw upon their strengths for the good of the whole team and the clients you serve? Once you find these answers both your staff and clinic will thrive.

CliftonStrengths’ studies have indicated that “people who do have the opportunity to focus on their strengths every day are six times as likely to be an engaged in their jobs and more than three times as likely to report having an excellent quality of life in general.” So basically, as you help people develop their strengths, you are helping your organization as a whole!

Overall, understanding and utilizing your talents will increase your confidence, curtail misunderstanding, energize you, and promote a positive work culture as you create another facet of living in your sweet spot…living with passion, purpose, and peace.

Leave a Reply