Find Passion for Work Using Personal Strengths
Discover Special Abilities When Planning for Career Success
Feb 26, 2009
This article describes how to build a successful career by aligning your passions and special strengths with employment opportunities. The serious career planner may wish to begin with the first article in this series, The Keys to Career Success. Subsequent articles in the series describe foundations for success often overlooked in employment advice and the critical role of life purpose in career achievement.
Plan for Career Success
Construct a successful career on the foundational elements of life purpose, passions, and personal strengths. Whether you're looking for new employment opportunities or struggling to make a better career where you're now employed, begin your search with a strong dose of self reflection before hitting the job boards and classified ads.
Why does work carry a negative connotation, while play implies just the opposite? Too often, one's work lacks the enjoyment of playful activities. Work has come to be known as something to be tolerated until time for play. Successful people are passionate about work, delighting in the enjoyment of receiving compensation for activities as pleasant as play.
Build on Passions
When planning a career or looking to jump-start a career that is stymied, select opportunities which maximize your chances to build on passions and utilize your personal strengths. Your passions are those activities you love to do. These are the activities you look forward to and plan for, making time for them whenever possible. While immersed in your passions you lose all track of time and are often in the stage psychologist Mike Csikszentmihalyi calls flow.
What if your passions seem available only as hobbies or entertainment? What if you've found no way to earn a living with your passions? Getting better clarity around your special strengths will help.
What Are Personal Strengths?
Your strengths, sometimes called powers, are those unique skills and abilities that have been with you for as long as you can remember. You intuitively utilize your strengths to accomplish tasks which others find difficult, but which seem easy to you. When involved in passionate activities you are using your strengths. When you align your career to utilize your personal strengths, you'll find passion for work. The combination of passion work and personal strengths yields enjoyable accomplishment leading to career success.
Discover your Personal Strengths
"What are my personal strengths, you may be asking?" Following are three ways to uncover and clarify your strengths; each offers opportunity for new insight.
- Make a list of the activities you love to do, your passions. Reflect upon each and determine what skills and abilities you use.
- Ask people who know you very well what you are very good at and the abilities that they admire. Friends and co-workers may identify different strengths from their perspectives.
- Fill out the VIA Signature Strength Questionnaire. This is a research site of Dr. Martin Seligman, often named the father of today's positive psychology movement. Filling out the questionnaire, which is in the middle section about halfway down, will take about twenty minutes and will yield a list of five or six personal strengths. Review this list with someone who knows you very well, confirming those that you both agree are indeed your special abilities.
Build a Career on what You Do Best
With this new understanding of your passions and personal strengths explore career possibilities offering the likelihood they will allow you to utilize them regularly. Ideally, the routine activities of the work will also be your passions and strengths. Use your connections as well as online research. The suggestions under The Paths to Success paragraph in The Keys to Career Success will also be helpful.
It may not be necessary to change career directions to garner greater success. Reflect on how you might better utilize your passions and strengths in your present work. To the extent this is possible, you may find renewed career success right where you are.
Enhance your ability to have a successful career by aligning the way you make your living with those things you love to do and do exceptionally well. When this occurs, work becomes more like play.
Sources: A Primer in Positive Psychology, Oxford University Press, 2006 and Authentic Happiness, Free Press, 2002.
Each article in this series is summarized and cross-linked in The Complete Process for Finding Career Success.
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