If you are looking for a career change or are just starting out, you may be asking yourself “what am I good at?” In this article, we will share 5 tips to help you answer this question and design the life you’ve been dreaming of. Keep reading to learn more!
Figure out what you're good at with the Advantage Mapping Foundations Course! This self-paced, on-demand course teaches you how to identify and leverage your unique advantages, guiding you to a fulfilling career that truly aligns with your strengths and passions. Don't just dream about success—map your way to it today!
Why It’s Important To Know What You’re Good At
Understanding what you're good at—recognizing your unique advantage—is not just about career advancement, it's about self-realization and finding genuine fulfillment in your professional life.
I embarked on a career in finance at 20, and I was driven by one overwhelming desire: to make money. Little did I realize, in this pursuit, I was turning my back on my intrinsic abilities—writing, speaking, presenting—all because society dictated a more conventional path towards financial success.
This revelation didn't come easy. It emerged from years of overlooking my true potential, adhering blindly to what I was told I should pursue. But here's an unsettling truth: I wasn't alone in this journey of self-neglect.
Like many, I had fallen victim to a system that prioritizes prestige over passion, often leaving our real strengths buried under an avalanche of expectations.
This oversight can lead us down paths that don't align with our true potential or passions.
Recognizing your strengths, or what I refer to as your Advantage Stack, is crucial for several reasons:
- Self-Awareness: Knowing what you're good at increases self-awareness, allowing you to understand how you are unique and what specific skills you bring to the table. This understanding is vital in navigating not only your career but also personal growth and relationships.
- Career Satisfaction: Engaging in work that plays to your strengths leads to greater job satisfaction. When your career aligns with your abilities and interests, it feels less like work and more like a natural extension of your passions and hobbies.
- Reduced Burnout: When you're working against your natural talents, every day can feel like a battle, increasing stress and the likelihood of burnout. In contrast, working in a role that complements your strengths can be energizing and fulfilling, making it easier to maintain enthusiasm and drive.
- Effective Contribution: Understanding your strengths allows you to contribute more effectively within your team or organization. You can leverage your specific skills to make impactful contributions, which in turn can lead to recognition and career advancement.
- Strategic Career Planning: Knowing what you excel at helps you strategically plan your career path. With the Advantage Mapping program I teach, students learn to identify their unique strengths and how these can be applied to find the right opportunities where they can truly thrive. This strategic approach to career planning positions you to seek out and seize opportunities that might otherwise be overlooked.
Knowing what you are good at isn't just about ensuring career success. It's about crafting a life that is more aligned with who you are, leading to greater fulfillment, effectiveness, and happiness. It's about turning your natural talents into your professional assets, guiding you to not only succeed but excel in environments that value and cultivate your innate strengths.
How I Figured Out What I'm Good At
As I mentioned, I personally struggled with figuring out what I’m good at and how I could use my talents in the world.
Advantage Mapping is the exact system I created for myself and used to transform from irritated, pessimistic cubicle dweller to alive, abundant and optimistic entrepreneur, coach and mentor. I love what I do, and I want you to as well.
It all started with understanding my own unique advantages:
- I found advantages I didn’t know I had
- I started using other advantages I was suppressing
- I learned how to use those advantages to unlock opportunities
- I created new energy and optimism in my life
- I'm making an impact
- I'm present at home
- I'm having FUN!
- And we're killing it.
5 Ways To Uncover What You’re Good At
Here are 5 ways to uncover what you're good at. I go over each of these in in more detail in the Advantage Mapping course.
1. Look At The Things You Enjoyed As A Child
Exploring the activities and subjects that captivated us during childhood can offer surprising insights into our natural strengths and inclinations. This approach not only reconnects us with our passions but can also guide us toward a fulfilling career.
Think back to what you enjoyed most as a child. Did you spend hours sketching characters from your favorite books or creating elaborate stories with your toys? Perhaps this creativity points towards a career in graphic design, writing, or animation. On the other hand, if you were fascinated by taking apart toys to see how they worked, this curiosity could translate well into engineering, programming, or mechanics.
It’s also valuable to consider the roles you naturally adopted during group play. Were you the leader who organized games and made sure everyone knew the rules? This leadership could be a strong asset in managerial roles, project coordination, or education. Or maybe you were the mediator who resolved disputes, a skill highly valuable in careers such as counseling, human resources, or law.
Reflecting on these early interests isn’t about prescribing a direct path to a specific job, rather, it's about identifying the core skills and passions that have stayed with you over the years. These insights can provide a powerful sense of direction when exploring potential career paths or considering a career change.
Connecting your childhood interests with your adult career can lead to not just a successful career, but a fulfilling one where work feels more like a passion than an obligation.
2. Ask Friends, Family, Coworkers, etc. What You Are Good At
Another fantastic way to uncover your strengths and potential career skills is by asking those who know you best—your friends, family, and coworkers. Often, people close to us can see our talents more clearly than we can ourselves. They observe us in various situations, from handling stress to solving problems, and can provide insights into what we naturally excel at.
One efficient method that I have used to gather this information is creating a simple Google Form. This can include questions like, "What skills do you think I excel in?" or "What topics do you come to me for advice?" Send this form to a diverse group of people in your life to get a broad range of perspectives.
Once you collect the responses, look for common themes. If several people mention your knack for inspiring and motivating others, you might realize that you’re good in leadership roles, coaching, or education. Alternatively, if your peers frequently commend your analytical skills, you may have skills in data science, finance, or research.
This feedback can be incredibly affirming and enlightening, in figuring out what you are good at.
3. Take A Test
Taking online tests is another practical method to uncover your strengths. These tests can provide structured insights based on your responses to various scenarios and questions, offering a snapshot of your personality traits, aptitudes, and interests.
- Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI): This popular personality assessment divides people into 16 different personality types based on how they perceive the world and make decisions. Understanding your MBTI type can help you identify careers that suit your personality traits.
- The Big Five Personality Test: This test measures five major dimensions of personality, including openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The results can help you understand work environments and roles that would suit your personality.
- PrinciplesYou: This free assessment, developed by Ray Dalio and his team, offers a deep dive into your true nature. It explores how you think and what you value most, which can provide significant insights into the types of work environments and roles where you could excel. The results are incredibly detailed, giving you a thorough understanding of how to leverage your unique traits in your career.
- Truity Enneagram: The Enneagram test from Truity helps you discover your Enneagram type, which is one of nine personality profiles that describe people's emotional outlook and interpersonal style. Understanding your Enneagram type can be helpful in exploring career paths that align with your inherent motivations and interpersonal dynamics.
By taking these tests, you gain a clearer picture of your unique attributes and how they can translate into successful career skills. Each test offers different insights, so it might be helpful to try a few to see which resonates most with you.
4. Think About What Activities Give You Energy
Reflecting on what activities give you energy can be a powerful way to uncover not only what you are good at but also what might make you happiest in your career. This concept is rooted in the idea that energy is the currency of life, and managing it wisely can lead to greater productivity, satisfaction, and well-being.
Start by considering these prompts to identify energizing activities:
- What Activities Excite You? Think about the topics, industries, customers, clients, or projects that spark excitement. Which activities make you lose track of time because you're so engrossed? These are likely areas where you excel.
- When Do You Feel Most Alive? Recall moments from your recent work or personal projects where you felt particularly vibrant and energized. These moments can indicate a deep alignment with your core strengths and interests.
- Energy Drainers: Conversely, it's important to identify which activities drain your energy. Understanding what you dislike or find exhausting can help you steer your career towards more fulfilling and energizing roles.
Additionally, conducting an energy audit of your daily schedule can be incredibly insightful. Look through your calendar and note which tasks, meetings, or events energize you and which ones leave you feeling depleted. This exercise can help you make informed decisions about where to focus your efforts and potentially guide a career shift towards activities that enhance your energy rather than diminish it.
If you understand what naturally energizes you, you position yourself to not only excel but also enjoy what you do, turning your career into a source of strength and joy rather than just a job. This approach not only enhances your personal satisfaction but can also lead to greater success and fulfillment professionally.
5. What Are You Interested In And Curious About?
Exploring your interests and curiosities can play a crucial role in uncovering what you're good at.
Often, our interests align closely with our natural talents, offering clues to where we might excel if we pursue them further. Here are some prompts and considerations to help you delve into your interests and how they can guide your understanding of your strengths:
- Identify Disinterests: Start by pinpointing what you are definitely not interested in. This can be just as revealing as identifying what you love. Knowing what doesn't excite you helps narrow down the fields and activities where you're likely to feel engaged and productive. For example, if you find data entry tedious, careers heavy on analytics might not be your forte, but creative or strategic roles could be more engaging.
- Current Interests: Reflect on the topics, industries, products, processes, or unique combinations of these that fascinate you. What newsletters do you subscribe to? What kinds of books or articles do you gravitate towards? Whether it’s emerging tech, educational methods, culinary arts, or social media trends, your current interests can lead to careers that not only utilize your strengths but also keep you motivated and engaged.
- Potential Expanded Interests: Consider what you might be more interested in if you allowed yourself the space to explore further. Sometimes, constraints—whether time, resources, or self-imposed limits—keep us from diving deeper into areas that could captivate us. For instance, if you’ve always been intrigued by graphic design but have never tried it, giving yourself permission to take a course or start a project might reveal a hidden talent or deepen an existing skill.
- Combining Interests: Often, unique combinations of interests can reveal niche skills that are highly valuable. For example, if you are interested in both psychology and technology, you might excel in user experience design, a field that blends understanding human behavior with digital product development.
By actively reflecting on these areas, you can begin to map out a clearer picture of where your talents might best be applied. Your interests and curiosities are not just hobbies, they are potential indicators of your natural aptitudes and can lead to a fulfilling and successful career when pursued thoughtfully. The intersection of what you're good at and what you enjoy is where true professional satisfaction and effectiveness lie.
Are you ready to figure out what you're good at? Get started with the Advantage Mapping Foundations course today!
Next Steps - How To Determine What You’re Good At
Now that we've explored various angles to uncover what you're good at—from reflecting on childhood passions to leveraging feedback from those around you, and diving deep into your interests—it's time to synthesize this information and strategically apply it. Here’s how you can put it all together to define and enhance your professional path effectively:
1. Inventory Your Advantages
Start by making a comprehensive list of your advantages. These include areas where you perform better than others, things you enjoyed as a child, feedback from friends/family/coworkers, activities that give you energy, and topics you are naturally curious about.
This inventory will form the foundation of understanding where your strengths lie and what you are good at. Include everything from soft skills like communication and empathy to hard skills such as coding or financial analysis.
2. Define Your Circle of Competence
With your list of advantages, define your 'Circle of Competence'. This concept involves identifying the specific areas where you can apply your strengths to solve problems more effectively than others. Ask yourself, "What problems can I solve better than anyone else?" This helps carve out a niche or a specialty area where your talents can truly shine, making you a go-to expert in that domain.
3. Expand with High Odds Skills
Look at your Circle of Competence and identify any gaps in your skills or knowledge that, if addressed, would make your advantages even more powerful. For example, if you're good at graphic design but lack digital marketing skills, learning these could significantly enhance your ability to deliver comprehensive solutions in your work. Target these high-impact skills that complement your existing strengths and increase your marketability.
4. Experiment and Iterate
The real test of any advantage is its application in the real world. Start small with a micro experiment that allows you to apply your strengths in practical settings. These experiments are valuable for gaining insights into your strengths and preferences without taking too big of a risk.
For example, you could take on freelance work that aligns with your interests. If you're exploring graphic design, you might take a small project creating logos for local businesses. This allows you to apply your skills, get client feedback, and see if the work is fulfilling.
Monitor the outcomes and learn from each experience. Did your strengths play out as expected? What feedback did you receive? Use this feedback to refine your approach, improve your skills, and better align your career trajectory with your advantages.
If this all seems overwhelming, I will guide you through each step in my Advantage Mapping course!
How To Get Help Determining What You’re Good At
If you still need extra help figuring out what you're good at, here are a few ways I can help.
Take The Advantage Mapping Course
The Advantage Mapping Foundations course is an on-demand learning experience designed to help you discover what you're good at.
Through a structured curriculum, the course empowers you to identify your unique advantages, enabling you to harness these strengths for a more successful and fulfilling career path.
By focusing on what you naturally excel at, you can confidently chart a high odds path to personal and professional success.
This course is perfect for anyone feeling stuck or unsure about their career direction. Take the first step towards transforming your work life by signing up today and begin to thrive by doing what you do best!
1-On-1 Coaching
I work 1:1 with ambitious professionals to help them go from stuck to aligned and pursuing the work they were meant to do in our Advantage Mapping program.
Every single one of my explorers leaves with 1-3 high odds paths to break out, and they report an average of 100% jump in clarity and confidence in their ability to execute their career pivot.
Ready to get those results? Book a free 60 Minute no obligation call with me:
Bottom Line
Figuring out what you’re good at can take some work. This work involves looking inward and reflecting. But in my personal experience and from the success stories of my coaching students, answering this challenging question is truly worth it.
If you want to figure out what you’re good at, take the first step with The Advantage Mapping Foundations course.
