Emotional Zing

What are your strengths?  What are you really good at?  What is your genius?  What do you want to be when you grow up?

When I sit down and try to answer questions like these, no matter how hard I try, my mind continues to run in neutral, I simply cannot pop the clutch.  Sure I can throw out some half-baked ideas.  But I'll start doubting them in about twenty seconds.   I've been this way as long as I can remember.  About twelve years ago however, I began to put forth an effort to figure out questions like these.  Stacks of self-help books are littered about my office, giving testimony to my decade long stay at the Woodstock-Figure-it-all-out-Festival in my mind.  The intense rain, lack of food and no answers finally wore me down.  Funny, I thought bell bottom pants would have gone out of style by the 80's.

It took all of this time to sink in, but I finally agree with what most gurus say:  The answers lie within.  So instead of trying to perform a self-induced extraction by sticking my finger down my mind and spew forth these answers, I've decided to simply start watching myself.  Dick Richards calls it Notice Yourself in his book Is Your Genius at Work?  Marcus Buckingham provides some resource material in his book Go Put Your Strengths To Work that finally woke me up enough to get off my butt and do something.  The goal is to make note when I find myself doing something that I really like.  And to make note of stuff that I find really interesting, stuff that zaps me with an emotional zing, out there in the universe.  Dan Pink first planted this seed in my head in his book A Whole New Mind when he suggests to keep a design notebook.  Maybe I'll even try to write about them here...

Comments

[Debra Estep]

To your INNER creativity bro !

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CREATIVITY

'If you think of the universe as a vast electrical sea in which you are immersed and from which you are formed, opening to your creativity changes you from something bobbing in that sea to a more fully functioning, more conscious, more co-operative part of that ecosystem.'

Julia Cameron
The Artist’s Way

[David Zinger]

As a Zinger I appreciate the use of Zing in relationship to your strengths, gifts, talents, appetities, excitements, contribtuions or whatever you want to call them.

I believe strengths reside within and also in relationships. I think tough experiences transformed can also give us many strengths.

The University of Michigan makes use of others through their reflected best self exercise.

There are so many pathways and yet we are limited by time and energy that it just seems to make sense to know what will give the biggest return to others and ourselves.

I also like the free VIA Signature Strength Inventory at www.authentichappiness.org.

Be strong and last long...

David