Talent.

You’ve got it. And the world needs your talent. But do you know what it is?

One of the five key elements for creating a successful future is discovering your natural raw talent. The awesome part about this process is it’s not something you have to produce, rather something one must discover. Most people get discouraged when they can’t seem to immediately identify their natural talent. To this I say: change your perspective and enjoy the process! Things too often become driven by the end goal, but the self-discovery process can be a genuine delight if we don’t hyper focus on getting to the finish line.

We know that everyone has God-given natural talent of some kind, but the problem is most people have a hard time identifying their God-given abilities. Answering questions like: What am I really good at? What is my purpose? We look on hopelessly at the prodigies who discover their ability at an early age. For these individuals, identifying their talent is easy because many times it is so visible – even physical. Think about Leo Messi; the greatest soccer player in history. By the age of 17, he was already playing for FC Barcelona, one of the most prestigious soccer clubs in the world. He has gone on to dominate the soccer pitch and make history as he usurped long standing soccer kings. (I’m such a sucker for Messi videos on youtube – check it out, you won’t be disappointed!) Messi’s raw natural talent was easy to uncover, but you might not relate.

So how can the rest of us find our natural raw talent?

The trick is to use the community around you. Specifically, God designed the church, the body of Christ followers, to be the vehicle through which individuals identify their gifts. Finding your natural talent is not a process intended to be done in isolation. In fact, isolation in this process of self-discovery will probably land you on the American Idol audition comic reels. Doing this process together with other people also adds more joy to the process as long as the community around you are 1) people you trust and 2) people who are compassionate truth tellers. You have to buy into the observations you will hear and secondly, the feedback needs to come in a digestible format for you: specifically in a compassionate way!

To enhance the feedback from your community, you can add practical tools such as Gallup Poll Strengths Finder (an approach that focuses on sharpening your natural talents) or spiritual gift assessments like this one. (probably the greatest value we take from these survey tools is learning what NOT to spend our time on) When you begin to compare the feedback from your community and it begins to line up with the results of the surveys, you know you are onto something! Then you will be ready to unleash your passion to wield your talent…..more to come in Part 3.