"They" say we spend over 30% of our life at work. For some of us over-achieving, workaholics burning the candle at both ends, that percentage is likely even higher.
If we're spending over a third of our lives working, shouldn't we love what we do? We think so! That's why in this episode, we talk about another one of the "5 Clues to Talent": Satisfaction. Come join us!
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Identify What You Love
What brings you joy and satisfaction in your daily activities is a clue to your innate talent! Maybe it's the opportunity to learn, the sense of accomplishment when completing a task, coming up with creative ideas, collaborating with others…or something else. Whatever it is, understanding what you love to do. and why, can lead to a more fulfilling life – at work and home.Feel better. Do better.
When you operate from a place of joy and fulfillment, you feel better yourself, and make more significant contributions to those around you. A win-win! By focusing on doing what you love and leveraging your strengths, you can enhance your overall well-being and positively impact your relationships and work performance. Remember, hard work doesn't have to feel hard. You can actually enjoy what you do.Finding what you don’t love to do is not the same as finding what you do enjoy.
Sure, making a list of what we didn’t like about a task or activity can help us avoid those things in the future. But it won’t necessarily lead you to what you do enjoy. And you deserve a life that’s more than simply avoiding what you don't like. You deserve to thrive!
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Identify what you enjoy, and why. Pull out your calendar/planner and review the past two weeks of tasks. Identify the things you particularly enjoyed, experienced deep satisfaction, or were just plain fun. What specifically did you enjoy about these activities? Why did you enjoy those things? Reflecting on the reasons why certain activities or tasks bring you joy to apply that knowledge more broadly in other areas of your life.
Make it fun! When looking at your present or future tasks and opportunities, practice the self-coaching question: "How can I make this more fun?" or "What could I do to enjoy this task a little more?" Your answer should help you align your talent with the task, resulting in a stronger outcome. Don’t limit yourself to challenging situations. Things that are already enjoyable can always be more fun! 🙂
Further Reading: Check out the book Soar With Your Strengths by Dr. Clifton to learn more about the Five Clues to Talent, including this week’s topic: Satisfaction.
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LISA
Hey, I'm Lisa.BREA
And I'm Brea.
LISA
And today's topic is doing what you love, living your best life, having some fun.
BREA
Having lots of fun. Life is too short to not have fun, isn't it?
LISA
Absolutely.
BREA
You know, they, the proverbial they, say that we spend over a third of our lives at work. That's crazy, Lisa. A third of your life?
LISA
Well, and likewise, you get a third of your life in your sleep. So what's left over?
BREA
Well, laundry is left. Grocery shopping is left. Chores are left. Cleaning, you know, and that's what we squeeze into the early morning hours or the late night hours or the weekends is not necessarily stuff that we enjoy. So if most of the time is at work, why not enjoy it?
LISA
Yes
BREA
I think this is so foundational what we're talking about today, the clue to talent satisfaction. So what do you enjoy? What makes you happy? What? What satisfies you and why? Why is that satisfying for you? Is it the process or is it looking at the finished product? And what about the finished product is satisfying? Is it that it's done? Like Achiever loves to finish the thing. Or is it satisfying to look at the finished product because it's aesthetically pleasing? Or what is it? What is it about that finished product that's satisfying? And that's what clues us in to our talents. And when we can get that micro in understanding how our talents are working and how they're showing up, then we can start applying that intentionally in all the places. And that's when we can really change our lives.
LISA
Yes. And I think that it's easy for people to call out what they don't want more of. Here's what I dislike. Here's what I wouldn't like to do more of. Here's what I want to get rid of. Yet we're really missing this clue to talent of what do you love doing? What did you find attractive about that thing? what was satisfying about it for you. And then anytime you can make a connection to your values, preferences, motivations, CliftonStrengths talent themes, all of it, they just help you process why you love it so you can get more of that. And I think the reason you want to get more of that is because it makes you feel alive, because it allows you to show up at your best, because it unleashes your contributions to the world. Do you view that similarly or differently?
BREA
100% yes. Yes, yes, yes. You're right. It's so easy for us to just focus on what's wrong or what we don't like or whatever. And so it does take a little bit of hard work to figure out what is it about this thing that I do love But when we do that, gosh, that's what strength focused development, positive psychology, that's what this is about, right? Because when we look at where we messed up or if we look at what we didn't love, we could make a list. Easy, easy. of a hundred different things that we didn't love about it. And how does that help us? Well, it helps us avoid those in the future, but it doesn't direct us to what will make us happy. And it's so much easier to just take a few minutes and figure out, well, what did I love about that? and then you identified it and then it's like, okay, well, let's go get more of that and problem solved, right? Then we're not living in this life of just avoiding things that don't make us happy or that we don't do well, but we're focused on what does and then we get all of those positive benefits for ourselves and for others.
LISA
So agree with that. And it really does take conscious effort. I mean, that's clearly why it doesn't happen, because we tend to be overstimulated, overscheduled. We're so busy. Well, why we why we're the boss of our lives. And we're also the literal boss of ourselves. We get to choose. We all have that agency over our lives. If we're not doing what we love, we're choosing to not do. what we love. We could at least, all of us, every person listening, including the two of us, we can do more of what we love than we did yesterday.
BREA
Yeah, and it's not selfish. We're not focusing on what we love just so that you can focus on yourselves all the time and make it all about you. It really does impact those around you. And when you show up at your best, then you're contributing more. You're giving your best self to the people around you, to the workplace, to your customers, to your clients. And people want to be around you. You're strengthening your relationships with other people because I mean, if I had to choose between being with someone who was happy and someone who was just grumbling all the time, I would prefer to be with someone who's in a good mood and having a good day.
LISA
Oh, I thought of two things that sparked off of that. One is, how many times when I was in talent development departments in big corporate and we used to do these annual talent reviews, And how often a person would come up where they're like, oh, he's just a really good guy, really good to be around, really good to work with. Does that say anything about that person's results? Nope. But it got noted that that person's easy to work with, fun to work with, great to be around, probably because they do more of what they love. And so that whole energy that you feel from that person has a ripple effect on the culture, on the team, and people notice it even when they don't want to.
BREA
Yeah, I love that.
LISA
And then also I thought of this person. Her name is Jackie. Shout out to Jackie if you're here. She is somebody that I met way back when, when I was going through my MBA program. And I remember when we graduated, she landed her dream job in a compliance role. And it was one of my biggest insights about doing what you love because as she described her compliance role, I was literally thinking in the inside voice, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew. But I was like, you know, what's so great about this is that if other people do what they love, we're all contributing things that the world needs. And a lot of times, other people want that from you or need that from you. And they'd prefer to not be the one doing it. Like I'm so happy that I don't need to be in a compliance role because there's a Jackie out there who loves being in a compliance role. So that gets to the lack of selfishness thing that if you really tap into what you're great at, how you live your best life, doing what you love, showing up at your best, You're contributing something that somebody else doesn't want to do.
BREA
Oh my gosh. I love this so much. When I was in grade school, I remember so clearly being in class and the teacher would always ask for volunteers to read aloud. You know, we're in the textbook and they're like, who wants to read paragraph, whatever. And of course, I mean, communication is my number one. It always has been my number one. It is It's how I show up in the world with my mouth wide open. And so of course, as soon as I hear her saying, does anybody want, I mean, I know what's coming and my hand is just straight up in the air. I'm like, I want to read out loud. And over time, as I grew, I realized, no, Brea, you should let other people have an opportunity to read out loud, too, because it's so fun. Of course, everybody else wants to do it and you shouldn't, you know, hog it, you know, like give everybody else a chance. Isn't that how we think?
LISA
Oh my gosh, yes. This is such a great one. The one where you actually feel yourself in your inside voice as an adult. You would be feeling that feeling of the little kid raising the hand going, pick me, pick me, pick me. Oh, I hope they call on me. That's the doing what you love part.
BREA
Yes, but I learned to silence the voice because I told myself because it's so fun for me, it has to be so fun for other people and I should let other people get a turn. But what I didn't realize is it could be fun for me and not be fun for other people. Like most of the people in the class didn't want to. And so I'm just sitting there letting other people take a turn, but then no one else volunteers. And so it's a lose-lose for everybody.
LISA
That is another great way to look at clues to talent. Okay, Joe Darin, as a fellow strengths coach, and I remember him saying, I remember him saying something about seeing the shine in someone else's eyes. And it's either that it's like that sparkle that was in your voice when you were reading, because you're like, I'm going to make this colorful, and it's fun. And they could see that pop in you. And so I think That is a way to catch it in yourself. It's a way to see others when they're doing what they love to notice it and say, Oh, you're so good at that. And. I also think simultaneously that it was mature of you to notice you might be hogging it. This certainly happens at work where someone doesn't want to sound like the one who's always talking over people in meetings. And there are ways to still work around that. So you can maximize doing what you love.
BREA
Yeah, and I think it bears repeating that learning about our talents and just even learning language from an assessment like CliftonStrengths, learning what talents there are and what the talents do and what the talents enjoy is so helpful because we don't know what we don't know. And until I understood that it was fun for me to read out loud, because of my talents. That's my strength. And other people have different talents. Until I had that awareness and understanding, I didn't have the freedom to really engage with them or to hold them back. Holding them back was from a place of fear or from a place of negativity of some kind, instead of the freedom to say, look, I really want to make this contribution. It would be really fun for me to be the one to read out loud. But I also know that Lisa loves to read out loud. And so I'm going to invite her to do that. Then we're we're holding back our talents from a positive stance, you know, from a place of strength. Yes.
LISA
I think you're picking up on this thing that you and I have talked about in the past about the why being such an important exploration of this, not just the surface level, what you love, but why you love it, because we could both love reading out loud and for completely different reasons. So understanding why can really, can really shed some light on how you feel. Okay, now this isn't work related, but earlier we discovered we both liked board games and we didn't take the conversation any further. So I wonder if we could pick out some differences about what you love about a board game and what I love about a board game and use it as a way to shed some light on how different people's talents and values might color what they love, even though the outward end result, I love board games, being the same.
BREA
I mean, for me, my absolute favorite game to play, absolutely hands down, is Taboo because it's all talking. That's it, right? It's just words. But in general, word games are attractive to me, right? That's much more attractive than, oh, like, don't ever ask me to play Settlers of Catan or Risk. No thanks.
LISA
Okay, now we both lead through communication in our top, so we are going to have some similarities here. I do love the word games. I love Taboo. I love Balderdash. I love this or that games, but I always want to make up my own rules and be like, but why? Say more about what your preference is.
BREA
Hashtag individualization. We love it.
LISA
I love board games. Most of all, because I'm doing something with a group. I like the human element of board games a lot. If there's a structured activity that gets conversation flowing and gets something going, especially if there's a physical element, I'm totally in.
BREA
So I'm hearing some similarities. I think Relationships, definitely any game that allows us to come together and play. If it's a getting to know you type of game, a party game or something where I get to learn more about the people and the game is just kind of the vehicle, you know, to enjoy that experience. A hundred percent favorite. I'm just playing the game. You know, I'm also not competitive. We're just playing it and and talking, you know and sharing life while we're we're playing the game
LISA
So I think you're bringing up another one for me that I hadn't thought of. Duh. Competition is high for me and I like to win and like winning and hyping but I also like cheering people on and it's like I'm fine. I'm not a sore loser at all with games. I just love cheering on a person. But if I'm not good at Euchre and I'm not good at Trivial Pursuit because I'm a bad memorizer, I don't really want to play it as my first choice because I'm not going to have a chance of winning.
BREA
I would also say maybe that's a little bit of your maximizer, don't you think? Heck yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like you know what you're good at, you know what you can win. I always joke Maximizers are always good at everything they do because they don't do anything that they're not good at.
LISA
Hey, we're talking about doing what you love, getting more of the good, getting less of the bad.
BREA
When you played sports, did you enjoy team sports or individual sports?
LISA
Both. Both. Totally. And I also didn't get into things that I wasn't good at. If I knew I had no potential in that area, it was just gone. Basketball, when I was in sixth grade and I was the tallest kid in the whole class, great. But when I stopped growing in sixth grade, by eighth grade, I was like, oh, basketball's not going to be my thing. Let's move on to areas I have better potential.
BREA
And I think that that's, again, clues to talent, right? So a lot of times people don't understand that competition as a CliftonStrength is not the only competitive talent. There's actually three of the 34 that are very competitive. And I think you have all three in your top 10, or maybe your top five, don't you?
LISA
Tell more. Tell more. Everybody wants to know what your list is going to be.
BREA
I know, here we go on a tangent. So competition, obviously, and Maximizer is competitive, but more competitive with yourself. And then Woo, it literally has win in the title, right? Winning others over. So three influencing talents that are motivated, that enjoy, that are satisfied when there's a component of winning.
LISA
And even though it was a seemingly a tangent, it wasn't because you tied that into doing what you love and picking up those things that you love. And yes, by the way, those are all in my top 10. And let's see. So if we tie this all together, how would you send someone away with their homework of how to identify a little bit more of what they love, how to have some more fun or how to live their best life?
BREA
Actually, I think one of the best coaching questions out there, or at least one of my favorites, is how can I make this more fun? Or what could I do to enjoy this task a little more? That's a very easy self-coaching question that you can immediately start to practice today. And it doesn't have to be only when things are challenging. It can also be when things are going well. Add another layer of talent. That's really the best case to not just have one of these clues to talent shining, but if it could be easy for you and if you can enjoy it, you know, gosh, that's bonus.
LISA
Yes. And since you went specific and in the moment, I'll give a homework that is more retroactive, where you take a glance through the last two weeks of your to-do list, your calendar, and go through things you've already completed and pick out the ones that spark for you like, oh, I really liked that. I was really doing what I loved in some way when I was operating in that thing. And then ask yourself the why question or what, what did I love about that? Why did I love it? And see if you can get a little deeper to understand so you could apply that more broadly to other things. Now, if they want to work with you, Brea, and they're like, yeah, yeah, homework, but I want you to ask me these questions and walk me through it. Tell them best way to work with you.
BREA
Yeah. If you want me to coach you, go to my website, brearoper.com, then schedule a call.
LISA
And if you want to work with me, Lisa, on leadthroughstrengths.com, there's a link called get coached. I would love to step you through any of these kind of questions and thoughts that you might have for yourself. With that, I would end with this thought. I believe this came from Brea, by the way, but I'm totally stealing your line because When you're operating at your best, when you're doing what you love, you feel better. And people notice that you feel better and your contributions are bigger. So I'm going to steal the Brea line as a closer that is, feel better, do better.
BREA
Yes. You don't have to steal it from me. I'm sure I stole it from somebody else. It's just the truth, right? When we feel better, we do better. Go enjoy your life. Go enjoy your life. And always remember that hard work doesn't have to feel hard. When you work from your strengths, you get to do what you love and love what you do. And that's the life that we're meant to live. So let's do it.
“Remember, hard work doesn’t have to feel hard. Aligned with your strengths, it actually feels easy, energizing, and fun!”
MEET YOUR CO-HOSTS
BREA ROPER
Communication | Woo | Activator | Futuristic | Connectedness
If you need a Strengths Hype Girl, for yourself or your team, connect with Brea at brearoper.com. She’s ready to deliver an inspirational keynote, empowering training, or transformational workshop. If you’re looking for an expert guide to support your internal Strengths efforts, reach out today!
LISA CUMMINGS
Strategic | Maximizer | Positivity | Individualization | Woo
To work with Lisa, check out team workshops and retreats at the Lead Through Strengths site. For 1:1 strengths or life coaching, check out the Get Coached link. For independent coaches, trainers, and speakers, get business tools support with our Tools for Coaches membership.
The Fine Print: This podcast is not sanctioned or endorsed by Gallup in any way. Opinions, views and interpretations of CliftonStrengths© are solely the beliefs of Lisa Cummings and Brea Roper.