Let’s face it, most of our time we spend trying to be less different, and fit in more. It seems the easiest and wisest thing to do sometimes. Unless you’re someone like Picasso, you may be thinking, it’s best not to stand out from the crowd.
You may be puzzled by the ways you are different and try to hide them. Or your parents may have cautioned you, by saying, “Stop talking that way,” or “Don’t think that way,” without any explanation. They meant well, and were trying to make your life easier – they thought – but in the long run, in order to succeed, and enjoy good health mentally, physically and emotionally, you must know yourself and accept yourself. This means knowing in what ways you’re “different.”
“That which one feels in himself to be different is precisely that which is rare, and that is his worth,” wrote Andre Gide.
There’s an excellent assessment out now called the StrengthsFinder profile which will tell you your innate strengths. This means those things you were born with, and will die with, and are innately yours. They have names such as Activator, Focus, Relator, Connectedness and Deliberativeness. You can see that they’re different from any profiles you may already have taken. They don’t talk about “reading,” or “art,” or “writing,” and they don’t talk about traits such as “the healer,” or “the artisan.” This is a very different way of looking at yourself that I’ve found works over and over again with my coaching clients. To take the profile, go here.
Emotional Intelligence, which determines our happiness, success and health more than our IQ, is based on self-knowledge. You must know yourself, and this means you must know your feelings. We ARE our feelings, and they are our guides.
The better you can understand, identify, use and regulate your emotions, the better you will know yourself. The better you can do this regarding yourself, the more you can apply it to others.
Therefore, the more you appreciate your own uniqueness, the more you can appreciate the uniqueness of others. Being able to understand another person’s point of view and perspective is an Emotional Intelligence competency.
To bring this back around to discovering your strengths, the strength for Connectedness means that the person “knows we are all connected.” If this resonates with you fine, you probably have Connectedness for a strength. But if this isn’t something that resonates with you, you don’t have this “strength” and that is not how you look at things or feel about them. For YOU, the truth is different. You do NOT “know that we are all connected.”
Understanding how basic our differences can be, one from another, is part of Emotional Intelligence.
Today, list some of the ways in which you think you are different. Consider that these are the ways in which you are unique and of great value.
Then take an Emotional Intelligence assessment and see where your strengths and weakness lie in your EQ, and start working with a certified Emotional Intelligence coach.
Find out how you’re unique, find out about your Emotional Intelligence, and learn to build your life and career around these. The payoff is big!
