Do What You Love To Do

I always remember in the multinational firm where I was country manager of Japan, New Zealand, and then all of the Asian countries, that at performance evaluation time we had to fill in a performance evaluation on people who worked for us, and we had to list strengths and weaknesses. I know from my own performance evaluation reviews that minimal time was spent on the strengths and a tremendous amount of time was spent on correcting weakness, even if we had created extremely good results.

Human beings seem to have a love of focusing on the negative rather than the positives. Over the last several years of working with many thousands of people in our workshops and coaching, I have realized to get the best out of people is to let them focus on the strengths and support their weaknesses. I was delighted when I read a book called “First, Break all the Rules” by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman and published by Simon & Schuster business books, which supported what I have learnt. Gallup polls, which interviewed over 1 million employees and 80,000 managers, clearly showed that allowing people to focus on their strengths instead of their weakness let them create outstanding results and improved performance.

I want you to think about, and write down, what your top five strengths are. These are the unique gifts that you have developed during your lifetime, that have assisted you in achieving what you've done so far. I encourage you to use them, and focus on them, and stop worrying about the things that you don't do well. I will never know how to fix a car, and I don't intend to spend my life worrying about it. There are thousands of people who love fixing cars, and who are extremely good at it. If something goes wrong with my car I let those people fix it.

In other words:

“Do what you love to do.”