Former U.S. President, Barack Obama, sent a congratulatory text to Golden State Warriors forward Kevin Durant following the team’s June 2017 championship win over the Cleveland Cavaliers. The team should soon be going to the White House to meet the president. I have never gotten a text from the former president and have never been invited to the white house. Chances are, you haven’t either.
The question is, how come Kevin Durant is getting text messages from some of the greatest people in the world and I am not?
“A gift opens doors for a man and brings him before the great.” King Solomon
It’s not a coincidence that we use the same word for physical gifts that we can give someone to represent our natural gifts. Our natural gifts are the treasures that we offer to the world. Just like giving a physical gift to someone in authority would open doors for you, offering your natural gifts to the world will open doors to for you. It will take you to Olympic stadiums, presidential palaces, and television screens. Your gift will take you from rags to riches. But there is a caveat, the only natural gifts that can make a way for us are the ones that have been developed by acquiring knowledge and skills built around those natural gifts. These developed natural gifts are called strengths.
The Gallup organization defines a strength as “the ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance in a specific activity. The key to building a strength is to identify your dominant talents, then complement them by acquiring knowledge and skills pertinent to the activity.”
I love King Solomon’s wisdom. He once asked, “Do you see someone skilled in their work? They will serve before kings; they will not serve before officials of low rank.”
People who have turned their natural gifts into strengths that allow them to “consistently provide near-perfect performance” in their work will always be in great demand. They will be highly successful. Their strengths will open doors for them and take them places they might never have dreamed about.
Question for you is: What are your strengths?
If you don’t know how to find your strengths, my team and I can help. We can help you identify your natural gifts and show you how to turn them into strengths.
