Mental WOD for the Week: Play to Your Strengths...Find out How

Logan shows you what to do when you run out of rowers:-0

Growing up a lot of different people (parents, teachers, coaches, mentors) would tell me to play to my strengths. Well what if I didn't know what my strengths were?

So lets input our 1st Mental WOD for this week. To help uncover YOUR STRENGTHS you need to identify your best traits and weaknesses. Take a blank sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle. Label one side "Love it!" and the other side "Loathe it!"

During a this week, carry this paper around with you and separate your activities into the two categories.

In the love column are things you look forward to doing, tasks that seem to make the time fly by or activities that make you feel fulfilled after you've completed them. Tasks that are difficult to concentrate on and things you hope you never have to do again belong in the loathe column.
At the end of the week, you'll have a clear picture of your strengths and where your passion lies. Specifically identifying the activities that strengthen you will help you purposely gravitate toward them, as well as help you neutralize the ones you hate. You'll be able to avoid some of the activities that weaken you. For those you can't, by having your week so filled with activities that invigorate you, you'll have the strength to power through those activities that drain you.

At the end of the week send me the pic of all your love's and loathes.

Check where this idea come from.

Early in his life, Marcus Buckingham was fortunate to discover one of his strengths—that he is energized by people who are good at what they do. He developed that strength into a career, during the course of which he has interviewed tens of  thousands of successful people. His interviews have led him to write books that have sold millions, to speak before untold numbers of people and to share the stage with dignitaries, visionaries and world leaders. He now works through his company to help others discover and develop their unique strengths and abilities.

Feeling a bit anxious, the 12-year-old boy took his place in front of the audience. Students at his school in England participated in the daily assembly programs and, like some cruel joke, he was picked to read a passage. Looking around, he saw a multitude of eyes—all focused on him. As he opened his mouth to speak, a curious thing happened. His words flowed perfectly, and he completed his reading flawlessly. Never before had Marcus Buckingham been able to communicate well. Since he’d learned  to speak, he stammered so badly that people could hardly understand him. He endured psychologists and therapists but, while he knew much about what was wrong, not until that day in the assembly did he have a clue how to fix it.

"I realized right at that moment an odd thing,” Buckingham says. “I’m strengthened by having eyes on me, and the more eyes the better.” While many people tend to close up when speaking in public, he discovered just the opposite was true for him. His mind seemed to work better and faster when many eyes were upon him. So he began to pretend. When he was talking to one person, he would pretend that he was in front of 10,000. And after several months, the stammer went away.

Buckingham’s discovery at 12, that he could use something that strengthened him to navigate around a weakness, marked the rudimentary beginning of his life’s work. Although it would take him a number of years to articulate his philosophy and several career moves to fully develop and refine his message, his success in conquering his stammer by using a deliberate mind game served as his first stepping stone. “Now I speak for a living!” he says. “How ridiculous is that?”

Buckingham’s father and grandfather worked in human resources, and both helped nurture his interest. His father worked for Allied Breweries, which owned 7,000 pubs at the time. His father’s quest for ways to select better pub managers led him to an American company, the Gallup Organization, in 1983. 
                 

Read the rest of the article HERE