Few years back, while working in a multinational company I had my first encounter with coaching. I have attended a two days coaching course designed for managers to be able to support and develop their teams. Corporate stuff! At the end of the training I ended up being more confused than at beginning. Although the concepts were very well presented by the trainer and I fully understood them, what confused me was how my fellow students/colleagues implemented them during the role plays and practice sessions. When being coached and presented the challenge I wanted to work on, I was bombarded with lots of advices and recommendations. When I was requested to provide coaching and I have tried to apply the concepts my coachee was very unhappy I did not provide my point of view and tell him what to do. He deliberately resisted to answer my questions and directly told me to tell him what to do. Eventually I gave up as I wanted to finish a discussion that reached a dead end “I do not know, you tell me.”. My confusion after this first experience with coaching came of my lack of understanding why people extremely smart otherwise refuse to see the power of perceiving things differently than being “the smartest person in the room”. Until today, I keep wondering what might have been the reason for this…

I do not know how other people are, but I hate when people are telling me what “is best for me”, what should I do or think. Please do not understand me wrong, I am not talking here about formal education, training, mentoring or counselling. All my life was a continuous learning journey and I loved every moment and experience. I am also appreciating the learning from each and every person I come in contact with. I am a good listener and a fairly good team player. I also seek advice and mentorship when I face new challenging tasks or situation. But when I need to complete my tasks, take action or set my personal goals or make my personal life decisions I want to have the space to do them in my own way.

What might be the reason that urge us to instantly give advice, judge or “know what is best for you” when somebody in good faith impart with us a challenging situation they face?

I surprise myself doing this from time to time, especially when the person approaching me turns into a pessimist and maybe self-destructive. My first impulse is to show him/her all the good things in their life and push them to think positive. Obviously, most of the time this is not landing well as the other person might be just looking for compassion and empathy not for somebody to change their perspective.

As a person I am a day-dreamer, I live in today as well as in the future all together. In the worst situations I faced over my life, when I felt down and just wanted to find a hole and hide myself there, not seeing or hearing anything and anybody, I have only one strong desire: to be able to have a glimpse in the future (1/5/10 years), only 10 seconds to be able to see myself how I am, what I am doing, how I was going through my life. I think this automatically paint in my head an image of what I want to be, most of the time in light colors and this gives me the drive to deal with the situation I am in and move forward. Over the time I developed instinctively this faculty till it become my way of overcoming difficult situations I am facing. Of course, I do not possess a crystal ball or clairvoyant skills, but I have a vivid imagination and I can easily create in my mind the image of how the future should look like. And then the next questions I ask myself are what options do I have? What I can do now? Everything follows afterwards.

I strongly believe every person is unique. Very early in my life I learnt a simple thing: people will not reach performance or excellence being forced to do things they do not like or are not naturally good at. They might strive to please their parents/family, teachers, managers, do the best they can but swim in mediocrity and ending up being demotivated, or worse. It is true that working to fix our weaknesses we might prevent failure, but success can be reached only by building our strengths.

We live in a society centered to make us “fit in” and “fix” our weaknesses. Most of the time we also strive to fit it and be accepted in a group/community. There is nothing wrong or need to be fixed with any of us. We all have inside us everything we need to live happy and successful lives; we just need to connect with ourselves and re-discover what makes us tick, what are we naturally good at. And then leverage our inner talents, nurture them until they become our strengths and approach the any situation from this perspective.

Easily said than done, right? With all the pressure around us to make a living, to make sure we offer our families a good life, to please our family members, bosses and colleagues, friends…. And most of the time we further end up struggling to balance life commitments with career aspirations, navigate through unsecure times and put our dreams in standby.

How about we take a step back and take a look to our inner self, who are we, where we want to be, what makes us happy and put them in the reality context to serve us better. “In every job that must be done there is an element of fun. Discover fun… and snap, the job is done!” (Mary Poppins). If you look back to your success moments, the time you had fun and you were happy, I am sure you would discover they were the results of leveraging your natural talents. Even the times we thought it was just out of luck or we wondered “How did I do that?” are the results of your undiscovered or unknown natural talents.

There is a catch though, you need to be thorough with this talent discovery process and really true to yourself. Peter Drucker said that “most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong… and yet a person can perform only from strengths.” What about you – do you really know which are your strengths? And if you do – are you really using them to reach your potential?

I would love to hear from you, please share your thoughts… If you want to discuss further book a 30 min discovery session.