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Career Tips - Issue # 4 (Nov. 2004) FREE bimonthly newsletter dedicated to your career development. It will take about 10 minutes to read this newsletter. This investment will pay off if you read up to the end. Discover your strengths by Feedback Analysis Majority of us try to develop our careers based on our qualification and experience. Unfortunately, we ignore a key asset: our strengths. And the implications of this ignorance can be drastic, often in the form of continuous struggle and drudgery. Basically, we can only perform from the position of our strengths and mediocrity is guaranteed if we don't do so. So how to know our strengths? Try Feedback Analysis (FA), a method suggested by Peter Drucker who traces its invention back to the fourteenth century by a German theologian. FA works as follows: 1. Whenever you're about take a key decision or action, write down what you expect to happen. 2. Later, perhaps after few days, weeks or months, compare the actual results with your own expectations. This seemingly simple method, if practiced consistently, will reveal what you do well and where you flop--consistently. >>CAREER TIP: Begin an interesting journey of self-discovery from today. Start using FA and soon you will know two things: strengths and weaknesses. Next, do the following: 1. Leverage on your strengths, i.e., actively seek opportunities to apply your strengths. 2. Work on improving your strengths. That's how Tiger Woods mastered golf and Mozart his music. No one was a born champion of his trade. 3. Stay away from activities in which you have no strengths and have little chance of becoming even a mediocre performer. This is against the general wisdom of trying to fix weaknesses through training programmes. Note: If you're thinking you know very well what you're good at, that is all the more reason to try FA. According to Drucker, most of us are widely off the mark about own strengths and weaknesses. He himself has been using FA for decades (so it's not a one time affair), often with surprising results. Can you start to play football again? It was a ritual that Terry didn't relish at all. But it was a ritual that a group of children enjoyed very much. Every afternoon, after the school, about 10 children used to play football in a playground. The playground happened to be right in front of Terry's house. Terry, an old man, used to find the joyful noises of children too disturbing for his afternoon nap. And so he decided to do something about it. One day, he called the children over to the gate and asked them if they would like to earn a small sum of money for each game they played. Naturally, the children thought that was a great idea. Then, for several days the old man paid the children for playing. After about three weeks, following their usual excitement of playing football, the children found that the old man was not at the gate with the, now usual and expected, "loot." So they entered the gate and knocked on the old man's door. When he came out, the children asked him why he had not been at the gate to give them their money. His response surprised them. He said he no longer intended to pay them for playing in the front of the house. On their part, the children responded that if he would not pay, they would not play. >>CAREER TIP: When we enter the world of work after education, we are like those kids, full of enthusiasm, ideas and enterprise. Slowly, however, we start to associate work with many other things: salary, promotion, increment, pat on the back, company expectations, who is working or not working, etc. In other words, many old men walk into our lives and like those innocent children, we are hooked. We start to work and perform not because we want to but because of several other reasons. Can you detach yourself from all the hooks and simply start seeing work once again as an isolated adventure, which you are there to enjoy, no matter what? Can you start to play the game again because you love to? I leave you here with a playful thought. Will be back after two weeks. Best wishes, Atul Mathur FORWARD IT: Would you like to share what you've just read with any of your friends? Click below to send a link to your friends. To SUBSCRIBE to this newsletter, send a blank e-mail to:subscribe Career Tips ***Copyright 2004 Atul Mathur*** |
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