Your Life's Work
Careers that fit match worker's strongest natural abilities
Dallas Business Journal - by Don Hutcheson and Bob D. Mcdonald
Andrew is a naturally gifted salesperson. Elaine is an architect who found her true calling after floundering in college.
What makes them good at what they do? Why do their careers fit them so well? Part of the reason is that both make use of their strongest natural abilities in their careers.
We often talk about driving abilities, or fundamentally important natural talents that drive our careers. Two major driving abilities are idea productivity and spatial relations. Both are crucial in finding what tasks are naturally easy and what tasks would be more laborious.
Abilities are the natural talents you are born with. Unlike achievements, they are not improved by practice, nor does neglect make them go away. Unlike interests and personality, abilities remain stable throughout a person's working life. Unlike intelligence, each ability is specifically geared to certain types of tasks and roles.
Intelligent and motivated people can work against their natural abilities, but they are rarely happy or satisfied doing so. Nor are they as productive as they could be.
Idea productivity
Andrew loves selling. He loves finding just the right "hook" to get someone interested or deftly steer them around an obstacle. He flies by the seat of his pants when making a sale and loves the challenge of countering objections on the spot.
What he does not do well is keep records. He may get started on lists for his customers, only to drop it and start on something else in less than 60 seconds. A few minutes later, he will drop that, too. He is distracted by his own thoughts.
Andrew interrupts his friends, and his boss has noticed his limits when he is asked to think about strategy. But Andrew can persuade anyone to come around to his point of view. That's what makes him such a powerful and effective salesman.
Idea productivity is a powerful ability because it demands constant use. A person with high idea productivity who is asked to concentrate on the same task all day long will be miserable and not very productive. He may wonder why his concentration is so bad, but the truth is it is just a poor use of natural abilities.
The objective work sample that measures idea productivity allows us to count the number of ideas that occur to a person when asked to solve a standard problem.
Spatial relations
People who are high in spatial relations have a particular affinity and feel for things. They like to work with tools and enjoy making things. They are interested in how things work, how they are constructed and the structure of things.
They often are engineers, physicians and scientists. If they are not, they are interested in science. For a person with high spatial relations ability, abstract ideas, feelings, concepts and relationships never feel real. A table feels real, but dealing with feelings and relationships, like a counselor might do, would eventually feel empty to a person high in this ability.
In general, high school courses and most college courses do not use spatial relations ability. The objective work sample we use to measure spatial relations allows us to determine how well a person can think in three dimensions. Many people score high in spatial relations on objective measures who had absolutely no knowledge or sense of this ability. It was invisible to them because they had never used it. This had been true of Elaine.
Elaine is a successful architect, but she went all the way through high school and most of the way through college taking liberal arts courses, never realizing she had strong spatial relations abilities. While taking a year off from college, she met an architect and talked to him at length about what he did.
Fascinated, Elaine began reading books and inquiring about architecture schools. She went on to earn a master's degree in architecture.
Low and high abilities
There is really no such thing as a negative or "bad" pattern of abilities. Any pattern of abilities enables you to do some kinds of tasks and roles more easily than others. All ability patterns also make some kinds of tasks or roles more difficult than others.
As long as Andrew is selling face-to-face, he is not only successful, he is happy. If you were to take him out of that role and make him spend his days filling out complicated tracking reports, he would cease to be brilliant and become miserable and unproductive. This would be working exactly against his strongest ability.
When Elaine studied liberal arts and contemplated being a history teacher, she made good grades, but she felt unsatisfied and unfulfilled by her prospects. She was not using her strongest abilities. When she discovered her striking ability to conceptualize three-dimensional space, she blossomed.
A mismatch of job and natural ability pattern, or not using a strong natural ability, can lead to great dissatisfaction and loss of productivity.
Abilities alone cannot tell a person what to do or not do in life. However, knowledge of your abilities is perhaps the most fundamental piece of the career puzzle, whether you are just starting out, or you are at a normal career turning point and want to decide where to put your major focus and energy for the next few years.
Hutcheson and McDonald are the founders of The Highlands Program, a nationwide service for life and career planning based in Atlanta. In Dallas, call (972) 960-1472.
Latest News |
Most Viewed Stories |
Most Emailed Stories |
