Guest Post By Jenny Hansen: Playing To Your Strengths

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the Life List Clubs bi-weekly blog fest. If you aren’t familiar with the Life List Club you can find out about it on the tab up on my header (or click the link). Today, I am guest posting over at Carrie Mumford’s site on “Five Questions That Lead to Success“.

I am happy to host the fantastic Jenny Hansen of “More Cowbell” today. Jenny is an upbeat tech-master with a wonderful sense of humor and a great friend. Without further adieu, here’s Jenny.

Playing To Your Strengths

As a corporate software trainer, I’ve got to be ON each day I’m in the classroom. It doesn’t matter whether I was up all night with a teething baby or if my best friend and I had a fight. Nobody cares about those things when they come in for a day of Word or Excel or leadership training. They’re focused on what they need to learn and it’s my job to deliver.

There are personality types who would hate my job. They’d get tired by all that “on” business. I see it a little differently. Every day that I walk into the classroom, I know:

• All my problems get checked at the door.
• I’m going to provide a service.
• I’m going to have a fun day.
• I’ll get to see people learn, and light up over what they learn.

Do you see a trend with perks I listed above? It’s me, me, I, I. Even though it doesn’t look like it. Training is a vacation from my own busy head where I get to focus on other people. It works for me because it plays on some of my innate strengths.

I went to a Training conference earlier this year that was geared toward the accounting industry. The keynote presentation was called, “Building a Strengths-Based Organization” and it shined the light on a disturbing trend:

Society, starting with our schools and continuing through our workplace management teams, sure does put a mighty amount of focus on improving our weaknesses.

After hearing some speakers at that conference, I started thinking crazy thoughts. What might happen if these organizations put this same amount of energy in developing peoples’ strengths?

What kind of mountains could we move as writers if we applied our efforts toward being stellar at the things we’re good at, rather than focusing all our energy on our “faults?”

I’m not talking about turning into a bunch of narcissists that can do no wrong. I’m talking about making it a primary goal to discover your innate strengths and spend more time playing to them. This conference spun my head around and, strangely enough, most of what I learned applied more to writing than it did to training.

Let me give you an example:

We did an exercise in the conference pre-session where we listed the things we were good at – we had 60 seconds to scribble them down off the top of our head. We were directed to find the skills we’d always been good at.

Hint: Most people don’t “see” these innate skills as anything nifty or unusual. In other words, they don’t see their own special talents. (Sound familiar anyone?)

The abilities people came up with were amazing – there was so much talent in that room and the majority of it was not being used the workplace (read: writing), where we spend at least 50% of our waking hours. How sad is that? These abilities were being relegated to the hobby side of the fence.

My innate strengths, in no particular order, were: writing, teaching, motivating others, doing hair and learning software.

I felt extremely lucky when I looked at my list. Life pushed me early into a job I am uniquely suited for. Except for the “doing hair” part, my innate strengths describe the perfect software trainer. No wonder training feels so easy…it draws on at least three areas of my innate strengths, so it doesn’t feel like work.

This brings me to another worrisome trend:

I’ve noticed a disturbing trait that’s common to creative people, in this case writers: Many writers seem to think that because they have weak areas that they are bad writers.  

I have a question for you perfectionists: Why is it acceptable for multiple attempts when learning to ride a bike, or dance the tango, or knit but it’s an “epic fail” to write a few books before you get good at it?

Lots of first novels remain unpublished for a reason. They were practice for the other books. I don’t get why it’s expected to take years to learn the piano but it’s not acceptable sit down at the writing page and have less-than-perfect prose fall from your fingertips.

It doesn’t mean you’re a slacker just because you like to do the things that come naturally to you. In fact, I’m going to take this further and issue you a challenge:

Pay attention to the things that are easy for you and try to do them more often.

The easiest way to bring your “A” Game is to play to your strengths. In American League Baseball, they can use pinch hitters or pinch runners. Why can’t we do a little of that in our own writing groups?

In my critique group at Writers In The Storm we have:

• Pinch World Builders (Fae Rowen)
• Pinch Steamy Scene Pros (Sharla Rae)
• Pinch Description Writers (Laura Drake)
• Pinch Theme Builders (that would be me)

I can’t write a transition to save my life. I’ve had it take me an entire page to get my characters from an elevator to the front door of a building. (Yeah, that was embarrassing.) While we’re on my biggest “weaknesses”:

·        I feel like a voyeur when my characters’ clothes come off.