WHY IT IS SO IMPORTANT TO HAVE A CAREER THAT FITS YOUR NATURAL TALENTS, INNATE ABILITIES AND PERSONALITY

Take a duck and drop it into a pond. Even if it was raised in the desert and has no swimming experience, it will be instantly at home in its new environment. In a matter of minutes it will happily be doing what ducks do to make a living and exhibiting perfect natural mastery. That’s because ducks are designed for the pond environment they inhabit. They have an ideal set of talents and the perfect personality for their job.

One major difference between Human beings and all the other creatures is that all the individuals of most other species are pretty much alike. There are small differences between individuals, but, essentially, each giraffe is pretty much like all the others. On the other hand, every person is a unique individual, different in many ways from his or her fellows. We are different from the other people around us not only in personality, temperament and interests but in our innate talents as well. Each of us has already been dealt a very specific hand of talent/ability cards by our genetic inheritance that gives us a knack for playing a fairly narrow range of roles in the working world with natural ease and mastery.

When you see someone wind surfing gracefully, like a dancer in a high wind, moving quickly and powerfully across the sea, you are viewing the result of extensive training and a commitment to improve a body that was born with a special gift for balance and agility. People who were born with less coordinated bodies are rarely the ones out there in the stronger winds. It is more difficult for them to master the skills and usually not as much fun as it is for someone with natural talent. This is equally true with regard to the mental and physical talents we all use in our work.

This is one of the reasons why each of us is an incomparable, one-of-a-kind individual. These talents give each person a special ability to do certain kinds of tasks easily and happily, yet also make other tasks seem like pure torture. Can you imagine comedian Robin Williams as an accountant? Inborn abilities are completely different from acquired knowledge, skills and interests. Your interests can change. You can gain new skills and knowledge. But your natural, inherited talents remain with you, unchanging, for your entire life. They are the hand you have been dealt by Mother Nature. You can’t change them. You can, however, learn to play the hand you have been dealt brilliantly and to your best advantage. The better you understand your unique genetic gifts, the more likely you will be to have a satisfying and successful career.

Most of what we usually think of as special talents, such as Music, Writing, Math, Science, are actually the interaction of a group of deeper, more elemental abilities that, when combined well, play together in harmony like instruments in a band. Let’s use an example. Suppose you needed an operation and wanted to pick the best possible surgeon, someone with a real “gift.” Obviously, other factors, such as quality of training, degree of commitment to excellence, and length of experience are also extremely important. But since you are looking for someone who is truly excellent, you want a surgeon who combines excellent training, commitment and experience with natural talent. What would comprise the elements of that special gift?

First of all, you would want someone with high spatial ability, a talent for thinking in three dimensions. How would you feel about going under the blade of a surgeon who viewed your body as an abstract philosophical concept? You would want your surgeon to be a natural in something called diagnostic reasoning. This is a talent for being able to leap to accurate conclusions based on just a few clues. If something went wrong during your operation, the surgeon would use this talent to figure out what to do quickly. Another talent to look for would be something we call “low idea flow.” Some people have minds that move quickly, restlessly, seemingly at a hundred miles an hour. These folks are great at improvising, but are less adept at concentrating on one thing for long periods of time. They have “high idea flow.” Hawkeye, on "Mash," is one of those people. He is supposed to be a great surgeon, but this is highly unlikely because his attention is scattered rather than concentrated. Next time you watch an old "Mash" rerun, notice that his mind constantly leaps from one thing to another. You would want a surgeon who naturally and easily keeps his or her mind totally concentrated on the task at hand, especially if a problem or unforeseen circumstance arose. You would also want someone with “great hands.” Manual dexterity is an innate gift. If you had a choice between a surgeon with superb, average or low hand dexterity, which would you pick? While there are several more pieces to the puzzle of what constitutes the natural talents of a great surgeon, we hope you now have a basic sense of what we mean when we speak of innate talents.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THERE IS A MISMATCH BETWEEN YOUR TALENTS OR PERSONALITY AND YOUR WORK?

For anyone other than humans, the answer to this question is: extinction. Because we are so adaptable, we survive, but at a terrible cost. What gets extinguished is the pure joy of a life spent doing something that comes perfectly naturally. The farther you get from ideal talent self expression, the less likely it is that you will enjoy your day on the job. When important abilities go unused, people become bored with their work. When the job requires talents they do not possess, people find their work frustrating and difficult. Sometimes having only one thing out of whack can ruin their chance for career satisfaction.

When someone performs less than brilliantly at work, their supervisor often makes inaccurate assumptions. They think the problem is that the employee doesn't have the right personality for the job, isn't "motivated", isn't smart enough or has some sort of personal flaw. Most of the time they fail to understand that what's really going on is that the employee's innate talents and/or personality don't fit well with their job. The supervisor's attempts to correct the situation only make things worse. What would happen if your car's fuel pump was broken but you misdiagnosed the problem and began to adjust the carburetor? You would then have both a broken fuel pump and a carburetor problem.

PEOPLE ENJOY DOING WORK THEY DO WELL NATURALLY

When someone becomes highly skilled at anything they were not forced to learn, it is fairly safe to assume they are expressing a natural gift. It is also safe to assume that, if someone regularly spends many hours happily playing at some hobby, they are expressing a natural gift. Someone born with the collection of innate abilities it takes to be a master skier or, for that matter, a master at anything, turns each progressive skill corner much more easily. The same amount of energy and commitment that would take a less gifted person around one corner would take someone with a natural gift around ten. The way to really get your work life flying is to choose a career where you have exceptional natural talent and then put in the time and energy to become a real master. Talent and acquired skill are an unbeatable combination.

When people are doing something they enjoy, they get more done and they do it better. When someone performs at a level of mastery, it is usually a function of making use of acquired skills and experience in conjunction with a strong foundation of natural talent. What is most important is the role of natural talents. People who are both highly successful and continue to love their work, year after year, spend most of their time at work engaged in activities that make use of their strongest abilities. They spend very little time performing functions for which they have no special gift. Their lives are concentrated on doing what they do best. If you think about it, everything and everybody on earth except human beings does exactly that. What could be more elegant than the fit between duck and pond, tiger and jungle? The people you envy because they are both successful and happy with their work have found their natural self expression. Their talents are perfectly aligned with what they do.

CAN'T I SELF-ASSESS MY NATURAL ABILITIES WITHOUT GOING THROUGH A TESTING PROGRAM?

Our culture accidentally provides the tools to learn about some aspects of our individual abilities. For example, after years of gym classes, where you had the opportunity to participate in almost every imaginable kind of athletic activity, you probably know a great deal about your innate athletic talents or the lack thereof. The same cannot be said for most of the abilities that allow someone to perform brilliantly in some parts of their job, only competently in others, and have a difficult time with other tasks. Although most of us appreciate our unique individuality, few of us have done more than scratch the surface in regard to recognizing and appreciating the unique profile of talents we each have.

In addition to the problem of not having super-accurate talent-sensing antennae, there are also a couple of other problems. What you know of your talents is based only on what you have done before. If you are in mid-career and plan to choose a new career direction, you probably do not want to limit yourself to choices suggested by what you have learned from your previous experiences. It makes sense to look at a broader and deeper range of possible career options than would be evident by simply reshuffling the deck.

The other problem with self assessing is that what we think of as our talents are usually collections of innate abilities working together rather than the individual talents themselves. When people say they are good at Math, or solving problems with people, or writing, they are not describing a single ability but several working in concert. We see the loaf of bread, not the ingredients. If you think about it, there is not much you can do with a loaf of bread: make sandwiches, French toast, feed the birds. But there are innumerable ways you can combine the basic ingredients: flour, yeast, water, oil, and salt. On the shelves of your supermarket there are hundreds of items that are made from these few ingredients. So, the best way to assess your innate abilities in a manner that helps you design a career that will fit you perfectly is to get down to the deepest level, the basic abilities that combine to make up your unique profile of talents. And the one way to do that well is to go through an in-depth career testing program.

It is also very important to understand how your innate abilities and your personality interact. The already difficult job of self-assessing your innate abilities is made more complicated when you add into the mix the fact that you have a unique personality and temperament that also must be expressed and fulfilled in your work.

THE BEST WAY TO UNDERSTAND YOUR NATURAL TALENTS

The Pathfinder Career Testing Program is the most effective way to know with certainty which careers can contribute to giving you a life of maximum satisfaction and success.

WHAT IF I NEED MORE ASSISTANCE?

If you want a complete career decision-making process that takes you all the way through all the elements of designing your future career, the Pathfinder Career Choice Program is for you. It includes the Career Testing Program as a part of this design process.

Clients who discover they want more personal coaching after taking the Career Testing Program may decide to upgrade to The Career Choice Program.

Many of our clients combine the Pathfinder Career Testing Program with our best-selling book, The Pathfinder. This combination works well for clients who want a complete career choice process that costs less than the Career Choice Program.

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