Month: October 2024

When we navigate different phases of life, particularly after reaching significant milestones such as turning 60 or considering a career transition, it’s common to reassess our personal strengths and passions. Understanding what truly motivates and energizes you is key to finding a career or pursuit that brings both fulfillment and success. However, identifying your strengths and passions can feel overwhelming without a clear strategy.

As a career and life coach, I enjoy guiding my clients through the process of conducting a personal skills audit, exploring new passions, strengths and interests. This process allows people to align their skills with the next phase of their life. Whether that’s for a career transition or focusing on an encore career!

Why Identifying Strengths and Passions Is Essential

Your strengths are the skills and abilities that come naturally to you and can be honed through experience and practice. Passions, on the other hand, are activities, subjects, or causes that spark joy, excitement, and a sense of purpose. Identifying both is crucial for several reasons:

Career Satisfaction

Aligning your strengths and passions with your work leads to greater job satisfaction, as you’re more likely to enjoy and excel at what you do.

Personal Fulfillment

Beyond your career, knowing what you’re passionate about helps guide decisions in your personal life, whether you’re pursuing hobbies, volunteering, or exploring creative outlets.

Work-Life Balance

When your career aligns with your strengths and passions, it can enhance your work-life balance, reducing stress and improving overall well-being.

Now, let’s walk through how to identify these critical aspects of yourself.

Step 1: Conducting a Personal Skills Audit

A personal skills audit is a self-assessment exercise that helps you identify your core strengths and areas of expertise. Here’s how to conduct one effectively:

List Your Professional and Personal Achievements

Start by listing both professional and personal achievements from all periods of your life. Consider times when you felt proud of your work or accomplishments, and take note of any recurring patterns. For example:

• What roles or responsibilities did you excel in?
• What tasks came naturally to you?
• What types of projects or activities did you enjoy the most?

This exercise helps you recognize the areas in which you have consistently demonstrated strengths. Include not just work-related achievements, but also personal accomplishments (e.g., leading a community project, learning a new skill, or overcoming a significant challenge).

Ask for Feedback from Others

Sometimes, it can be difficult to see our own strengths objectively. Asking for feedback from trusted colleagues, friends, or family members can provide valuable insights into skills you may not have recognized. Ask questions like:

• What do you think my greatest strengths are?
• In what situations have you seen me excel?
• What skills or traits do you admire in me?

The feedback you receive may surprise you and help you see yourself from a new perspective.

Identify Transferable Skills

Transferable skills are abilities that can be applied across different roles or industries. These skills often include communication, problem-solving, leadership, adaptability, and collaboration. Identifying transferable skills is important if you’re considering a career change, as they can be leveraged in a new field or job.

Review your list of accomplishments and feedback to pinpoint these versatile skills. For example, if you’ve successfully managed teams or projects, leadership and organizational skills are likely transferable to other roles.

Assess Your Weaknesses

While focusing on strengths is essential, it’s also valuable to understand your weaknesses or areas for improvement. Knowing your limitations allows you to make informed decisions about what roles or projects to pursue and helps identify areas for growth.

Ask yourself:

• What tasks do I find challenging or draining?
• Where have I struggled to achieve success?
• What skills do I need to develop to reach my goals?

Understanding these aspects of yourself can help guide your next steps and highlight areas for future learning or improvement.

Step 2: Exploring New Passions and Interests

Once you’ve identified your core strengths, it’s time to explore new passions or interests that align with the next phase of your life. Here’s how to discover or reignite your passions:

Reflect on Your Hobbies and Interests

Think back to activities or hobbies that have brought you joy, whether recently or earlier in life. Have you always loved writing, painting, or cooking? Are you drawn to solving complex problems, helping others, or working with your hands?

Jot down these interests and explore how they might connect to new opportunities. For example, if you’ve always been passionate about fitness, perhaps you could explore a career in wellness coaching or personal training. If you enjoy creative pursuits, consider whether you can turn your hobby into a side business or full-time venture.

Experiment with New Activities

If you’re unsure of your passions, experimenting with new activities can help you discover what excites you. Take classes, attend workshops, or try volunteering in areas you’re curious about. For instance, if you’re interested in photography, sign up for a course or join a local photography group. If you’re drawn to public speaking, try participating in a Toastmasters group.

By engaging in new experiences, you open the door to discovering hidden talents or interests you may not have considered before.

Consider What Energizes You

A key indicator of passion is the energy you feel when engaging in an activity. Reflect on times when you felt truly energized and motivated. What were you doing in those moments? Passion often comes from a sense of flow – the state where you lose track of time because you’re so absorbed in what you’re doing.

Identifying these energizing activities can lead you toward your passions and help you align them with your strengths.

Step 3: Use Tools and Assessments to Clarify Your Strengths and Passions

There are several helpful tools and assessments available to guide you in clarifying your strengths, passions, and career direction. Here are a few popular resources:

StrengthsFinder

The CliftonStrengths (formerly StrengthsFinder) assessment identifies your top strengths based on your responses to a series of questions. It’s designed to help you understand what you naturally do best and how to leverage these strengths in your career and personal life.

By pinpointing your top strengths, the assessment provides actionable insights into how to build on them and use them to achieve your goals.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

The MBTI is a popular personality assessment that helps you understand your preferences in how you perceive the world and make decisions. It categorizes people into 16 different personality types based on traits like introversion/extraversion, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving.

Knowing your MBTI type can provide insights into which careers or activities align with your natural inclinations and personality traits.

Ikigai: The Japanese Concept of Purpose

The Ikigai framework is a tool for discovering what brings purpose and meaning to your life. It’s based on four key components:

• What you love (your passion).
• What you are good at (your strengths).
• What the world needs (your contribution).
• What you can be paid for (your career or livelihood).

By reflecting on these areas, you can gain a clearer understanding of what aligns with your strengths and passions, and how to pursue work that brings a sense of fulfillment.

Exercises to Help You Identify Your Strengths and Passions

Here are a few practical exercises to further clarify your strengths and passions:

Journaling Exercise: The Peak Experience

Think about a peak experience – a moment when you felt particularly fulfilled and successful, either professionally or personally. Write down the details of the experience:

• What were you doing?
• Who were you with?
• How did you feel?
• What strengths did you use?

This exercise helps you pinpoint moments of alignment between your strengths and passions and can guide you toward similar opportunities in the future.

Passion Brainstorming

Set a timer for 10 minutes and write down everything you’re passionate about. Don’t overthink it – just let your thoughts flow. Once your time is up, review your list and identify common themes or interests. This can reveal patterns in what excites you and help you explore new paths.

Skill Swap

Partner with a friend or colleague and exchange skills. For example, if you’re good at graphic design and they’re good at marketing, teach each other a new skill. This exercise not only helps you hone your existing strengths but may also introduce you to a new passion or skill you’d like to develop further.

You Are Not Alone: Aligning Strengths and Passions for a Fulfilling Future

Identifying your strengths and passions is a powerful step toward a more fulfilling career and life. By conducting a personal skills audit, exploring new interests, and using tools like personality assessments, you can gain clarity on what drives you and how to pursue opportunities that align with your true self.

Having someone to guide you through this process can be helpful and unlock some areas of awareness you had not considered for yourself. In my practice, I’ve found that we often keep ourselves “small” by not allowing ourselves permission to think of opportunities larger than imagined. If you are ready to start exploring what’s next for you and unlocking your strengths and passions then let’s connect for a free 60 minute clarity session.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

What do you feel is your number one strength or “super power”? Have you recently made a career transition into something more rewarding? How has focusing on your strengths helped you to show up for yourself and others? Have you recently explored a new passion or interest? Share in the comments!

Although the best way to know if you’re suffering under a spending or shopping addiction is to seek out the support of a qualified therapist, we can use six questions to get a broad understanding of how spending may be impacting your life.

If you answer “yes” to any of these questions, it may be time to get help.

6 Questions to Ask Yourself If You Think You Might Be Addicted to Spending

1. Is your spending negatively affecting one or more of your relationships?
2. Has your work performance or living situation suffered because of your spending?
3. Have you ever stolen anything to keep spending or lied about your spending?
4. Have you experienced adverse physical outcomes due to your spending (headaches, sleepless nights, etc.)?
5. Is spending a part of your daily routine?
6. Do you think about spending when you cannot shop?

Addiction Can Happen to the Best of Us

Addiction and addictive tendencies have long been seen as a personality defect. There has been a stigma against drug users and alcohol abusers, in particular, for much of our history.

But spending often slides under the radar. After all, spending money is something we must do to live. Everything you need to survive, even time off from work, you need money for. We can get by just fine without ever using heroin or cocaine, but we can’t go more than a few days without spending money. It’s like food in this way. We need food to survive, and we need to spend money to survive.

Reasons for Spending Addiction

There are about as many reasons for spending addiction as there are people suffering under it. In my holistic financial coaching practice, I’ve seen spending addictions break into a few very general categories:

Rebellion

Often rebellion is a result of financial abuse, even at a low level. If we feel like we’re being obligated or forced, one of our natural tendencies is to be rebellious and resentful. I know this can look like a personality defect, but rebellion and resentment are actually protective strategies. If someone (or some situation) is forcing or obligating you and controlling your money, of course you’re going to secretly, rebelliously take back control and spend!

Control

When we feel like our control or choices have been removed, we will exact control in any way we can. And spending is a socially acceptable way to take control. It can be a balance of novelty, some choice (but not too much), and distraction.

Restriction

It might seem counterintuitive, but restriction generates the rebellious mindset we talked about above. If we feel like we have to lock down our spending, stop spending on “unnecessary” things, and tighten our belts, eventually we will respond with reactive spending. And then very often we pile shame, regret and remorse on ourselves, vow that next time it’ll be different, make our apologies and promises and start the cycle all over again.

It makes no difference to your brain whether you are restricting yourself or someone else is restricting you, eventually we all lose that fleeting motivation and “fail.”

Recovering from Spending Addiction

The first thing you can do to begin undermining a spending addiction is actually pretty simple. Instead of correcting yourself, denying yourself, or shaming yourself, you can simply start with one question:

“What is the purpose of this spending?”

One of the practices I ask my clients to do is to reflect on the purpose of their spending AS they spend. Let’s say Judy is buying groceries, as she swipes her card she reminds herself of the purpose of the groceries, “Dinner for the family tonight, lunch for tomorrow.”

Not only does this practice make that spending real to us, but it also helps us understand the purpose behind our behavior.

Occasionally, as people begin this practice, they may feel that they are justifying purchases to themselves. But because the purpose of this practice is to be aware of spending, that sense of justification typically fades.

We are practicing awareness of your spending without judgment here, but we’re also slowing down decision making. If you find patterns like you are spending to take control, or spending to relieve the pressure of a long day your brain may automatically look for other ways to do the same thing whereas before when your brain was just reacting you might have even told yourself, “this is the only way I can feel better.”

Going Deeper into Your Spending Addiction

Before we talk about a big strategy for undermining a spending addiction, I need to make a clear distinction between restriction and abstinence.

When I’m coaching with my clients I rail against restrictions. But if there is an actual addiction at play, a thoughtful, planned abstinence may be called for.

Restriction is an emotional reaction. It shuts us down and can often lead to a spiral of resentment, shame, and pressure.

Abstinence is intentional and typically planned for. It can even be thought of as a kind of experiment. If you are considering abstaining from spending it will likely take some time and thoughtfulness.

How to Abstain from Spending

Again, I recommend seeking out the care of a therapist who’s experienced in addiction therapy prior to starting any attempt at tackling your spending addiction.

This is not easy. We’re not talking about a few days, but more like four weeks. Some people may see a change in two or three weeks, others will have to abstain for six or more. And abstaining from spending can be tricky. If you have a particular store or website (looking at you, Amazon) that is part of your spending addiction, can someone else do spending for you during this time?

Spending is not a drug, not really, but withdrawals can still be intense. I’ve heard my clients say they have an increase in anxiety, sleeplessness, distracted thoughts and headaches.

If you are at all concerned about your mental or physical health before or while you fast or abstain from spending, seek care before you begin.

Abstinence is doing nothing less than resetting your brain’s pain-pleasure balance, and that means for a time at least, this is likely going to be extremely unpleasant. The good news is that on the other side of this abstinence, I’ve seen my clients consistently have less stress, feel more comfortable and confident in their decisions (financial and otherwise) and are able to build and rebuild relationships.

If you’re considering abstaining from spending (or a certain kind of spending), here are a few prompts you might think about before and during your period of abstinence:

• What do you think you might notice as you fast or abstain from spending?
• What kinds of outcomes would you like to see?
• What do you think will be the hardest about this time?
• What do you think will be the easiest aspect of this spending fast?
• What do you need to be successful in this?

Quick tip:

If I can offer you one piece of advice to make this spending abstinence easier, it is to be patient with yourself.

In Conclusion

Spending addiction is an easily available and socially acceptable kind of addiction that has the potential to disrupt and harm relationships and financial resilience. But you can undermine your spending addiction and learn to trust yourself again without punishing yourself, restriction, or shame.

Finally, if you need help with an addiction, it is available at:

• USA: 1-800-662-4357
• Canada: 1-855-499-9446
• UK: 0808-163-9632
• For other countries, type “help with shopping addiction [country]” in your search engine.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

Has spending turned into a pastime? Would you be able to live without buying things for a period of time? Have you noticed an addiction toward spending? What do you usually purchase that you later realize you didn’t really need? What do you do with such purchases?

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