How to Unleash and Sharpen your Talents

Talents are the world’s best assets for its future. On a collective and global level, it is in society’s best interest to encourage and nourish new talents through education, training and development programs and other means of knowledge transfer.

It must make sure to provide individuals with adequate and fair opportunities to develop their potential and help them invest in their future. This assures a fair return in social contribution and participation.

On an individual level, it is also in everyone’s best interest to look after themselves and make sure to cultivate and make good use of their talents. There is nothing more dissatisfying than living a life with wasted talents and nothing more enriching than being in perfect line with your true potential.

Unleashing your talent is therefore a superlative prerequisite to excellent living both personally and socially.

One of the most difficult problems in a person’s life is finding one’s true purpose and part of that problem is unleashing hidden talents and making use of them in everyday life.

Here are a few tips which can help to provide the right setting for unleashing and cultivating your talents with the least amount of friction and stress.

1. Identify your talents through awareness and inner focus. This means placing more attention towards inner feelings and motivations and ask yourself questions such as: “What drives me?”, “What type of work or activity puts me in the right mood?”, “what makes me happy and never makes me tired working on it?”

2. Recognize your talents and accept them with an open heart. Sometimes talents are suppressed because of fear of disapproval or social pressure. Be fearless in finding your talents. Talents are pure and powerful. Be grateful for whichever talents you possess.

3. Don’t be judgmental or critical about them. You cannot say “I’m not very good at this” when you haven’t trained or developed it yet. And even if so, you have to give it space to grow more. Criticism and perfectionism can bury a talent instead of developing it.

4. Assess your talents with an analytical mind (not a critical mind) and try to objectively ask practical questions such as: “What is my level of knowledge/expertise in this subject? “What objective do I want to reach with this talent?”, “How long will it take me to develop it and how much time am I ready to invest in it?”, “How can I organize my life around this talent?”.

5. When you are sure you have a talent you want to develop, put it on top of your priority list and declutter your mind from other objectives which are not conducive to helping you develop those talents. Keep it simple and focused.

6. Don’t try to reach too much in one go. Plan it ahead and spread it out over practical and down to earth timeframes.

7. When your heart is resolute to develop a talent, it is important to start now. Often, we recognize what we have to do, how to do it and where to do it but not when to do it. We have all the knowledge and the willingness but not the readiness. Our mind starts deferring it because of some excuse or other. You may not have a perfect start but who does? It’s important to start now.

How to sharpen your talents:

1. Practice, practice, practice: No matter how naturally talented a successful person is, he or she will tell you that there is not other way but to practice. Practice is the key to maintain and improve on your talents.

2. Learn, explore and expand: With so much information freely available about practically anything, it is easy to increase knowledge about your subject. Read books, blogs, articles, watch videos and widen your knowledge. The broader the perspective, the richer your talent will grow.

3. Ask, share and reflect: Networking and leveraging on other people’s knowledge is still one of the fastest and most productive way to learn. Go into forums, online communities, blogs, webinars, whatever, and be open to ask others, share your experiences and most of all stop to reflect on what you learned. Reflection gives you space to cement information into knowledge.

1. 

   Srinivas Rao says:

   January 3, 2010 at 3:29 am

   @Gilbert,

   I think that unleashing talents is something that happens later in life to many of us. But focusing on them is really where I think success happens. I realized that in my new job I’m going to be getting paid to do the thing I’ve been doing for for free for 8 months (blogging, social media marketing, and things along those lines) so it’s embracing something that is clearly a passion.