Has anyone ever told you that you can develop any strength you want, as long as you put in enough time for it?
After all, practice makes perfect, and putting in effort into something will turn that something perfect over time. Right?
We need to spend time after school on our homework or projects to submit to our teachers and lecturers for our grades.
We need to balance our time and ensure we spend enough time on each subject to get good grades for all of them.
Well think about this:
Bobby is not that good in public speaking, but through hours of practicing, he is able to deliver a decent speech during a school assembly to his cohort. But what happens when he gets unexpected questions thrown his way after the speech?
Strengths Development: A Consistent Practice?
For someone who is naturally good in public speaking, they will be able to handle the questions easily without prior practice. For Bobby, he might struggle in that situation without preparation.
In this case, Bobby’s hours of practice did not make his performance perfect.
His practice merely made his performance permanent, or consistent.
Practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanence.
Talent is understood as the natural ability to do something. Public speaking, playing the guitar, singing, doing mathematics, even understanding chemistry equations.
Have you ever heard someone play back a tune on the keyboard just by hearing it once? “How does he do that?!” we scream in our heads.
Or, take a soccer player who is able to take a free kick that always lands the ball perfectly at the top left corner of the goal post.
Do they have a formula? I bet they do – but its in their heads, their heart and their limbs!
If we ask them, they would say “it’s natural”, and at this point, we, the common folks, would let out a huge internal sigh and whisper “I have no hope”.
But, it’s true! People who do something so well consistently, at a near perfect level, do what they do naturally.
A Talent is the natural, recurring pattern of our thoughts, feelings and behaviour.
But how many of us have really invested in studying ourselves, in the way we think, feel and behave naturally to our environment?
Or how many of us make judgments about people we know and put them in a box because we lack understanding on how they think, feel and behave? Remember when you judged a classmate for being slow in understanding a simple Science fact?
Strengths Development cannot happen without our conscious effort to observe and improve our learning journey.
Self-awareness is the first step to unlocking our true potential and to helping us to be more effective and efficient in the work that we do. By utilizing our strengths, we will be able to see ourselves performing at a consistent, near-perfect level, be it in our homework, projects or class presentations.
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