So what do you think the most successful people in the world do? They chase that feeling. Sure they can look at being better time managers, better public speakers, better at balancing the books, but what they do best is keep focusing on that feeling of being successful and what it means to them. Focusing on the right things will allow you to be open to finding ways to achieve that thing. The feeling of achievement, the feeling of mastery, the feeling of satisfaction, all these positive feelings can be achieved in endless ways. It’s the feelings that we all chase not the "things". Yes we have preferences of things but that’s because we believe that it is one thing over another that will bring us the best feeling.

So if we are all really chasing feelings how then can we make this work to achieve what we want? The answer is simpler than you would think. Chase the good feeling things every day in every aspect of your day. The newest way of describing this approach is called "playing to your strengths rather than your weaknesses". Discover what empowers you. What are the things that you love to do? What are the things you look forward to doing? These are the things that strengthen you. To reach levels of advanced success you need to find ways to do more of what excites and uplifts you.

So if you are not playing to your strengths most of the day (73% of 198,000 workers polled by the Gallop organization, don’t use their strengths most of the time) think of the improvement that is possible. That’s over 7 out of 10 people at your company who are not working to their potential. If your business has room for improvement look at what you have to tap into. If you would like greater profitability look at the potential. With over 7 out of 10 people not playing to their strengths everyday, any wonder there were 1.6 million people according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics who started a new job in the 2006-2007 financial year.

One of the main reasons a person leaves their job is because of lack of job satisfaction. People will even accept lower pay if they have high job satisfaction. If you can increase the amount of time that people do tasks that strengthen them they are more likely to be more productive as they are efficient at what they are doing, they can perform the task well many times because they are good at it and they enjoy it. You are more likely to hold on to valuable company members and therefore reduce the need for training and retain valuable company knowledge. Absenteeism is likely to be reduced due to increased job satisfaction. The list goes on and on.

Focusing on people’s weaknesses will further drain already dissatisfied employees. Certainly there may be a case for neutralizing some weaknesses that people possess, but exponential growth will not come from minor increases of people’s weaknesses. Don’t forget, our aim here is to achieve large, decisive, exponential growth, not small improvements. So if people aren’t playing to their strengths what are they doing? They are trying to "fix" their weaknesses. A weakness is something that depletes you that you hate to do, that you avoid at all costs. Spending the majority of your time doing these tasks means your performance is most likely to be negatively affected. All the opposites of what we have talked about with strengths are more likely to occur.

As we all know, a great way to get ahead of your competition is by reducing costs and increasing productivity. Encouraging people to play to their strengths instead of labouring over their weaknesses is certainly a way to achieve these goals. It has many far-reaching positive effects and can be used to the advantage of all.

If you would like to find out more about how to identify strengths and weakness, increase your life satisfaction level, or how to increase your bottom line by encouraging people to identify and use their strengths more often, please contact me at Advanced Success Life Coaching and we can have a no obligation chat.

In the meantime, enjoy!

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