Life is an adventure, not a snooze-fest. It's a series of events, decisions, actions, RE-actions, and quiet ponderings of the soul. Of course, that's not ALL life is, but sometimes we feel like "well...this is it." Or more often, we don't even realize that we have reduced ourselves to routine robots just going through the motions. Sure, exciting things happen in our life every few years, but other than that, we're just waiting for time to pass. If we aren't careful, we'll wake up and a half of a century has passed, and we still don't feel like we're reaching our full potential. We just turn out to be mediocre people...average.
In some ways, "average" isn't so bad since it means that you're ahead of half the others! But this is the lie our modern society expects us to believe by awarding a trophy to every winner AND loser, a prize for every performance level, a "cost of living salary adjustment" for every employee regardless of their performance (or no raise for anyone because things were "tight" this year) - all contributing to the celebration of mediocrity. The thought of rewarding great performance and shunning laziness and ineffective work isn't very Politically Correct because it might hurt "Little Jimmy's" feelings. Many believe that a good way to make themselves a better person is to focus on their weaknesses and strengthen them, By doing so, people won't be able to observe as many flaws to criticize and we can become a jack-of-all-trades...while effectively being a master of NONE.
Let's shift the paradigm and take on a positive mental attitude of our life in the perspective of abundance, not scarcity. What if we identified our STRENGTHS, and only focused on developing those areas? Could it be that our weaknesses would fall into the shadows because our strengths were shining so brightly?
There is a plethora of different "personality profiles" and assessment tools available that attempt to help you understand yourself more clearly. Unfortunately, the words and concepts used to describe our character in these evaluations are too abstract, and we get lost in the translation from semantics to real-world application. I always found this to be the case...UNTIL...I took the StrengthsFinder 2.0 assessment. The premise revolves around 34 strengths that EVERYONE possesses at varying degrees. By identifying each of our TOP 5 strengths and reading through a summary, a bulleted list of action items, and quotes from others with the same traits for each of these TOP 5 strengths, individuals are able to clearly see how they were hard-wired to live life.
I believe that through identifying our character, we find our passions. Once we identify our passions, we can explore vocations. And when the two ideally intersect, we have found our calling in life, thus achieving our unique purpose here on Earth.
You owe this to yourself: go to the StrengthsFinder website, spend the money you had in mind to use for lunch tomorrow ($10 bucks), spend 45 minutes playing a question game of "Would You Rather...," and commit to breaking out of your monotonous cycle of being average. This is your chance to feel fulfilled in your life's work. If you realize and own the fact that you're not currently working in a field related to your strengths, then PLEASE pray for the courage to make a change, or send me an email and let me find ways to encourage you! We only have one life to live. And tomorrow isn't guaranteed, so what are you waiting for??!!
"I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." -Philippians 4:13
