00:00:00 Thanks for joining me on episode 654 of the inspired stewardship podcast. Yeah. Hey friends. My name is dr. Gary Johnson and I serve as the executive director of effect of elders. I challenge you to invest in yourself in others and develop your influence while impacting the world by using your time, your talent, your treasures, to live out your calling,
00:00:31 having the ability to grow yourself through self-leadership is key. And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this, the inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott Mader. See the truth is if you sat down for even 30 minutes and you began to dream a little bit, you begin to think, what was I good at as a kid?
00:01:00 What am I good at as an adult? What is the things that people come to me and ask for help in? And they treat me like I'm the expert? What are the things that I love to do? If you look at all of those things, then you begin to find your own strengths. And as you do welcome, and thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast.
00:01:25 If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling in the inspired stewardship podcast, you will learn to invest in yourself, invest in others, and develop your influence so that you impact. And today's episode about impacting the world through stewarding your talent.
00:01:52 I talk with you about why knowing your strengths is so important, why there are many different tools that can help you, but the tools aren't really the end and what to do with all of those things that you know about yourself. Instead of just looking at the tools, you've heard me talk about developing your talent and what are the best ways to do that is through books.
00:02:16 But if you're like most people today, it's hard to find the time to read. And that's why today's podcast is brought to you by audible, go to inspired stewardship.com/audible to sign up and you can get a 30 day free trial. There's over 180,000 titles to choose from. And you can pick one and listen your way to developing your talents via audible. That's inspired stewardship.com/audible
00:02:45 to get your free trial and listen to great books the same way you're listening to this podcast. Now growing up, a lot of times, people focus a lot of time and energy on overcoming their, you know, finding the things that they're just not really good at and spending a lot of time and effort improving in those areas. And that's not necessarily completely bad in that we should identify areas where we need to be functional,
00:03:14 or we need to have a certain level of skill and work on those areas. But the truth is becoming really good at something is mainly about investing in your strengths. It's about spending time in those areas that you have a sweet spot, the, the things that come easy to you that are things that you enjoy, things that you work at. Things that you're good at that not necessarily everyone is see the truth is we all have things that are our own strengths and yes,
00:03:47 there's similarities, there's patterns. There's things you can do to identify broad trends, but you also have a unique view, a unique set of experiences. And it's important to know these because the truth is you can make a bigger impact by working in your strengths than by working on your weaknesses any day of the week. The truth is by taking the things that you're really good at and getting even better at them.
00:04:16 Those are the areas where you can serve the most people. Those are the areas where you can have the most impact. Those are the ways that you can influence them Most people and you can, And really help the world. So it's important to really spend some time and some energy figuring out what your strengths are. Now, there are tools that you can use to help you with that.
00:04:40 There first off, there's the whole myriad of personality type test, where you can look at disc or Myers, Briggs, or other personality tests. And you can find out things about how you're wired, there's communications style type of programs like bank and others, where you can use those. And they, they begin to identify the way you view the world.
00:05:02 There's things like strengths finder put out by Gallup, which helps identify some of the core areas of strength that you have sort of mainly focused around business or around productivity, but there are still strengths and they label you as things like futurist or analyzer or learner or whatever, all of these tools. And trust me, you can find literally thousands of them out there are important and they're useful.
00:05:30 They begin to help you put labels to certain things. But the truth is the tools are just the beginning. They're not the ending of that journey. What always happens way too often is we'll take something like a new cool assessment that just came out well, we'll take the in ground. We'll take the disc. We'll take the Myers Briggs. And for a little while,
00:05:49 we kind of become enamored with it because it gave us a new set of labels that we can put on ourselves and let's face it. Ourselves is usually one of the best topics that we can ever talk about. Knowing ourselves is something that we always love to do and talking about ourselves is even cooler. And so we'll go around telling everybody I'm a three,
00:06:09 you're telling everyone I'm a C you're telling everyone I'm all I N T F G, or J or whatever it is does, but we never really do anything with that knowledge. Here's the key. When you begin to identify things that you're good at, when you ident begin to identify your strengths, it's not enough to just know them. There's two factors that you really have to take into consideration.
00:06:33 One is what are you going to do with those strengths? How are you going to put it in action out into the world? Are you going to use it to help other people? In what way? What are you going to do with it? And the other is, it's not all about you. You also need to understand how do your strengths interface with other people,
00:06:54 because see the truth is other people have their own way of looking at the world too. And it's not that their way is better or worse or right or wrong, but they have their own sets of strengths. And how do your strengths interface with others to build something even stronger? How do you partner with people where their strengths are your weakness? How do you identify groups of people?
00:07:17 And then how do you communicate and make synergy happen where these folks work together in a way that's even more powerful than any of them alone. Don't see the truth is, is if you sat down for even 30 minutes and you began to dream a little bit, you begin to think, what was I good at as a kid? What am I good at as an adult?
00:07:37 What is the things that people come to me and ask for help in? And they treat me like, I'm the expert? What are the things that I love to do? If you look at all of those things, then you begin to find your own strengths. And as you do, you then have to put it into action. That's the challenge.
00:07:59 See, taking all of those myriad of things that you know about yourself and actually doing something with them, not just taking the assessment because it's cute and it's fun, but actually putting it into action. That's the most important thing you can do with any of the strengths to find out. So when you think about the new cool tool that you take, don't just think about the tool.
00:08:23 Don't just think about what it told you about yourself, but actually take that tool and figure out how you're going to put it into action. And then number two, take that tool, take that information and begin to think about how does that make other people see you? How does that interface with the people around you? How does that fit into the larger puzzle piece?
00:08:44 Because when you think about it, that way, you begin to recognize that it's not about you. It's about how does what you know, and what you do fit in with others. That's the way we really impact the world. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast, as a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively,
00:09:16 listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you like this episode on the stewardship of talent, you can go over to inspired stewardship.com/talent and sign up for our five week series on the stewardship of talent. Or if you're in the U S you can text four, four, two, two, two talent tips,
00:09:44 that's talent tips to four, four, two, two, two, and get those tips until next time, invest your time, your talent and your treasures, develop your influence and impact the world.