Classic: How to Discover Your Giftedness

I said sure, and I found out later he just – he was consulting for my friend in his business; he just wrote it off into the businesses fee. But it was really the best $750 that guy ever spent, because when I got the results of this analysis it was as if I had been stumbling around in the pitch black room, tumbling over furniture, running into walls, and somebody just reached over and flipped on the light switch. I suddenly went now I understand what it is I’m trying to do with my life, and I began to make choices on the basis of that ever since. I got into a lot of communication projects; writing ventures, publishing ventures, video, and the guy who had developed this process was trying to get a book written on the subject of giftedness.

He was having trouble getting his manuscripts published so he finally cried uncle and let me get in there and help him, and it was working on that project I just realized how taken I am with this whole phenomenon of human giftedness. So I reinvented my consulting practice around that, and that’s really what I’ve been doing for the last 20 years

Everybody tells me I need to follow my passion, but I don’t know what I’m passionate about. I don’t – I believe passion is an emotional response to something that engages you. It could be high, it could not. But everybody has this phenomenon of motivation, something that drives their behavior. Giftedness is really a combination of ability and motivation. You’ve got to have both. You can be motivated to sing in the opera, but the problem is you don’t have the ability. You sing in the shower…

If the coach knows what they’re doing, they start to see little idiosyncrasies about how this person does whatever they do. In our case we go back in your life and we ask you to come up with activities that you’ve done that you’ve enjoyed doing and done well. Remember, enjoyment is the tell-tale sign that your giftedness is involved, and these are often very simple and mundane things even; like I learned to ride a bike or my brother and I built a treehouse in the backyard when I was seven or I took a history exam in eighth grade, and I just really go into this thing and this project.

Because when you show them this stuff it can literally transform the direction of their life, and I’ve seen that over and over and over. I estimate in the last 20 years that I’ve been doing this I personally worked with about 2000 people, and I could tell you story after story of people who once they figured out what that giftedness was, and started to make choices on the basis of it it’s amazing. Opportunities start to open up that they wouldn’t have thought about or considered, and of course I know that God’s work behind the scenes, because he wants you to get your giftedness in play. We go back to Genesis 1, the very first words that God said to human beings after he created them were be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and rule over it.

God wants to make this world flourish. He wants to bring life to it, and the means that he’s given us to make the world flourish is through the gifts that he’s given us, and everybody adds values a little differently. Some people are gifted the task of getting ore out of a mountain and turning it into metal. Somebody else is really gifted the task of shaping and designing that metal into an automobile. Somebody is gifted the task of laying out the highway it’s going to run on. Somebody else is gifted the task of getting the oil out of the ground and turning it into gasoline to drive it.

Somebody else gifted to the task of financing that, to educating all the workers to taking care of their bodies when they get sick, and to attend to their spiritual needs so that they really connect with God. So God’s given all these different gifts to us so that we would cause the world and its people to flourish. So God wants us to discover your gifts and get into paths that are fruitful for us.

So in that sense theoretically God could design an infinite number of human beings. But just to give you some examples; some people they don’t want to make an impact, they want to build things and develop things. Somebody else wants to understand something to a very deep level. Somebody else it’s all about gaining response from people, and influencing their behavior. Then you have people that they can see potential, and then exploit that potential. They often end up as entrepreneurs. You have people that love to plan and produce often turn into great administrators because they can get the logistics and the operations functioning.

Then you have the creative types we tend to call realize the concept; they can get a vision in their mind and then bring about perhaps through a song or a movie or some other finished product. It’s just – it’s amazing to see people wake up to this unique thing that they have and how they go about doing it. I’ve never seen anybody break into tears over the results of their Myers Briggs test. But it’s not unusual for people when you – when I finally confront them with the analysis, and here’s what it really shows about you, they’ve lived that experience their whole life. But to have it named and celebrated, for many people it literally reforms their understanding of themselves in a very positive way.

Even after the fall I believe that the first way and the most common way that people discover their gifts is they get feedback from other people and the environment. Of course, much of that feedback is from parents, siblings, teachers, peers, and that’s okay to a point except that being fallen human beings oftentimes that feedback it’s couched in negative terms. I can name the very thing that’s true about you in terms of your gift, put a negative label on it like perfectionist, anal retentive.

It’s like in a swimming pool with a bunch of ping pong balls; you can try to keep them underwater, but sooner or late they’re going to pop up, and giftedness is like that. Even in oppressive situations giftedness will out itself, and so I think about tribes out in the jungle or nomadic groups in the desert or whatever. Over time people start to realize this person’s exceptionally good at farming; their crops always seem to yield more. Meanwhile this person over here is great at telling stories, and this lady over here is fantastic in cooking. This person here seems to have a knack for helping you process the questions you’re asking and just wise. So people will slowly, but surely, figure out what some of people’s gifts are.

Now, having said that I’d also point out that in our declaration of independence, the founders they said that there are three inalienable rights, which means they’re rights given by the creator. You can’t just do away with them, and they are obviously life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So what they meant by the pursuit of happiness was to do life, to pursue life in the paths that you felt God was leading you to do. It’s inherent in order to pursue that you have to have freedom, and you will notice around the world throughout history where people have been given freedom to educate and then to exercise their gifts you have flourishing. Where those freedoms are not present you tend to end up with a automatons and people that in many ways are becoming less human.

Now, we’re still as I say only 75 years into what amounts to a grand experiment. We still don’t know very much about how to educate knowledge workers, how to position them for effectiveness, how to organize them and manage them, how to incentive them. We’ve just had endless experiments trying to figure this out as we go, and I think we’re making a little bit of progress. But it’s still very early in that transition, but it’s profound to think that the nature of work fundamentally changed back there. The locust of work moved from the land of the mind, and that effects the giftedness piece because we really have to think about how do you add value.

That’s different; there’s the whole realm, and certainly this is become big in our time, the whole realm of entertainment that where a lot of people reside and where the arts tend to get expressed for example. Arts aren’t technically speaking manufacturing, they’re not services in one sense, and so part of what I think you’re suggesting is that when you move from a basic subsistent level of life with where you either are growing things or designing things, manufacturing things to all these other characteristics and possibilities you open up the field for how giftedness can express itself.

I just realize in that moment that she had just had this assumption about the nature of work and the nature of church work, and the two weren’t to be confused. It’s like – it’s as if God has put all this grace into us through his gifts, but we stay in the toolbox. We don’t get out there and use it. It’s like we’re keeping all the goodies for ourselves and our churches, and meanwhile there’s a world that’s starving for people who have a real purpose in life, and also committed to doing the best work they know how to do.

But when we Christians tend to read our Bibles it’s almost like we put a set of glasses on that limit us to seeing and interpreting so many of the text within this really narrow context. For instance, if you go to the New Testament and Paul says something like therefore be tender hearted, forgiving one another as Christ has forgiven you. We tend to think that means somebody in church I do that with, and we don’t tend to think that also includes the coworker that you’re next to at work, the customer that his hacked off or hasn’t paid or whatever. We spiritualize these passages and therefore narrow them instead of saying this is for all of our life; we take that into all of our life.

In fact, when he describes the Samaritan as a good neighbor, and he ask the lawyer who he’s telling the parable to who proved to be the neighbor to the one who fell among the thieves. The guy is so traumatized by the example he doesn’t say this is some Samaritan. He says the one who showed mercy; he can’t even say it. So there’s this idea of how we serve other people made in the image of God and a caring that extends without boundaries in such a way that we show who we are. The third passage is in my head is a very famous passage. It’s the passage in Jeremiah where the call is to exiles – Jewish exiles who are in Babylon, not exactly the most friendly and spiritual place in the history of mankind. The exhortation is serve the city.

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