become your inspiration

According to just-released data by Gallup, only 13 percent of people worldwide actually like their work. Only 13 percent employees are “engaged” in their jobs, or emotionally invested in their work and focused on helping their organizations to improve.

The data, which are based on nationally representative polling samples from more than 140 countries, show that 63 percent are “not engaged”—or simply unmotivated and unlikely to exert extra effort—while the remaining 24 percent are “actively disengaged,” or truly unhappy and unproductive.

It’s a disturbing number, to say the least, don’t you think so?

Which group you would assign yourself to? Would you be one of these 13 percent? If so, my congratulations! If not, the following questions are for you:

What do you really want to do in your life?

When you will start listening to yourself and do what you really love?

These are powerful questions that take time to answer. I can tell you that only few of us can honestly answer to these questions. I noticed that we tend to live “with a flow”, we tend to enjoy our lives, without thinking too much about what we are actually doing during our day? How do we spend our precious time? Where are we going? We tend to live as if we were living forever.

Economist and psychologist, Larry Smith explains why majority of people cannot have the career they want.

He raises the important question: “What would be the highest expression of your talent?”

According to him in majority of cases we never reveal our talents and hardly interested in finding out our passion in life. Why? Because some of us we strongly believe that only “special people” or genius can find their path and do what they really love.

However some of us, we are lucky ones, we know what we want to do in life. But…never do this. We do not pursue our goals and dreams, because we are afraid. Afraid to fail. Afraid to try. Afraid to be misunderstood.

According to Larry Smith, many of us we seek for refuge in human relationships, as our excuse no to find or pursue our passion. We have a family or relationship, that is why changing the career is too much risky and might not bring enough money.

I guess there will be always something that will prevent us from doing what matters to us. Always.

You will say: “And now what?”

“Do I need to quit my job? Shall I leave everything behind and start the new life?”

To be honest I do not have the answer to this. You do. There is no magic formula. But maybe it’s time to dedicate our life to something that matters to us? Maybe we can find a balance between “what we need to do” and “what we want to do “?

Larry Smith explains how we can start revealing our talent and pursuing our dreams. We can have 20 interests, but there will be just one or two out of these 20, that will engage us for real, and this will be our greatest love, our passion in life.

What is something that interests you? What was the last time you felt real happiness, motivation and satisfaction after the work you did? When was the last time your work had an impact on someone’s life? Take time to remember these moments.

My sincere congratulations to those of you, who are on their way towards revealing their talents, and to those of you who already assigned themselves to those 13 percent.

 

Where to start if you are still not between those 13 percent?

Today I have a short exercise for you. Let’s start taking the first step towards revealing our talents:

Please write down 10 things that you really like doing. 10 of your interests that really matters to you and that make you happy. You can start with your hobbies.

Once you have the list, make it smaller, identify 5 out of these 10. The most important 5. Then try to group them, what these activities are? And from there you can start discovering what you can do with this list? There can be only two possible solutions after this exercise: read it, and forget OR read it, start discovering your passions and taking small steps towards what matters to you.

If I found my talent, you can find yours. If I made it happen (the starting point is this blog), you can make this happen too. There is always time to start listening to ourselves. There is always time to start living our lives, dedicating time to what matters to us.

I would love to hear from you on this topic, which stage of discovering your talent are you? Have you ever experienced this “highest expression of your talent?”

With love,

Jelena