The instinctive, natural selection of wanting.

I can remember when I first starting hauling out my soapbox to preach to my managers about the “perfectly good sense” of strengths management, i.e. doing what “great managers” were supposed to do — select people well, and match their job roles up with their innate strengths. Personally I don’t have too much trouble picking out the strengths of other people; I’m naturally drawn to strengths, and I had to cultivate more empathy for those managers who had a hard time with it.

However, in my experience I’ve found that does not mean they aren’t meant to be managers. There are many great managers for whom initially diagnosing the strengths of others can be daunting, yet once an employee’s strengths reveal themselves, those same managers are indeed great coaches and mentors to have supporting you. They’ve learned to create safe, trust-filled work environments where they need not excel in picking out strengths themselves because their employees will freely tell them. While it is also true that many employees don’t quite know their own strengths and can’t verbalize them, these same managers have learned to employ other methods to help with their eventual diagnosis.

For some managers, it was easier to spot what was wrong than what was right. “Right strengths, right role” simply meant they needed to focus on getting problems to go away. I had one manager who’d explain to me that he could always tell when he had a “fish out of water; the more they flap around, the longer their pond’s been dry.”

I thought about that manager, and how good he was with his staff, toward the end of my reading of The One Thing You Need to Know, where Marcus Buckingham shares this:

“As I can attest, when you are asked every day to engage with the world in a way that is unnatural for you, when, every day, you miss things you should have seen, when, every day, you are confused by things that others find clear, it is a draining experience.”

You feel like a fish out of water.

Buckingham goes on to explain that people feel drained when they are in positions that call for strengths which are clearly their areas of weakness. I kept smiling to myself as I read through that section of his book, thinking about my manager who’d ask me to let him “get my fish back in the water” whenever he felt his team could come up with a better approach for some new company initiative. He usually did, gaining our expected results in his own way, because I learned to honor his instincts, and let him employ the methods he instinctively wanted to use instead.

My take on this is that people feel drained when they are called upon to do things that they simply have no desire to do: There seems to be this instinctive natural selection process we are born with — it’s called wanting. Strengths are best defined as predictable patterns of behavior you gravitate toward because it’s natural for you. It’s kind of nice to know that one of the best things you can do for yourself is listen to that inner voice telling you what you want to do, for no other intellectual, logical, pragmatic, or perfectly sensible reason other than that you WANT to be doing it. Emotional, gut level instincts are rich sources of water.

Problem is, we’re continually trained by others — our parents, our teachers, our bosses — to stifle those feelings, buck up, and be an adult — to try harder. Try harder at something you just don’t want to do, and you can bet you’ll feel drained.

If others are confusing you about what you should want for yourself, don’t listen to them. Trust yourself. Let your instincts guide you: succumb to those emotional feelings about what you want to do. Believe that your wants are your natural selection process aligned with your innate strengths.

Wanting is a good thing.

Other posts on my study of The One Thing You Need to Know: Optimism: don’t leave home without it.
Don’t let Reinvention intimidate you.
Strengths and Values.

Comments

[Jay]

WOW -
When the student is ready....

Rosa, thank you for your post today. I think many of us struggle with the dichotomy between where our passions lie and what our parents/teachers/society told us that we needed to do in order to pay the bills.

What you have just done is given many people permission to FIND their strengths and FOLLOW their passions.

That is a wonderful gift.

[Rosa]

Mahalo nui for your comment Jay. And thank you for the generous post you did after this on your own Renaissance Girl: that was quite a wonderful gift that you gave to me!
me ke aloha pumehana,
Rosa