Focus on What Are Your Natural Interests and Talents

 Natural interests begin early in life.

Natural interests are a part of a person's own "bent," as some would say. These interests begin early in life and are at the root of our intrinsic abilities and competencies. When we perform a task on the job, it is these natural abilities and talents that are the ones we tend to focus on using and are the ones we are most motivated to use.

What abilities do you feel most comfortable using when you carry out a task? It is those that we find the most satisfying to use.                                                               

Jobs or a career that use 60% of our natural abilities prevent boredom and emotional drain and burn-out.

For example, an idea and possibilities type person can really tire quickly if day in and day out all he or she does is make change as a cashier ... over and over.

	ABILITIES
Competent	NATURAL ABILITIES	Energizers
	Abilities that are a natural expression of who we are
Not competent	LEARNED SKILLS	Energy Drainers
	Skills our job requires us to learn in order to perform a task

Learned skills do not come so naturally.

Alice made her job a better fit

Alice’s current employment in the field of social work has involved some of her natural investigative and social interests, in particular when she finds resources to help the needy. However, she finds the unpredictability of people’s needs together with the regularly changing procedures of the job to be quite a stressful combination. In such a situation the organized environment of her job becomes jeopardized with too much uncertainty.

She loves to investigate and had loved so much the predictable research assistant work she had done for a professor in college. Such work allowed for more uninterrupted time so that she could better employ her interest in creative exploration that could help some 'cause.'

When Alice realized how much research energized her, she asked her boss whether it would be a help to document resources and arrange them by topic. She suggested that these pages could then become a helpful reference for the other social workers in their section.

She was pleasantly surprised to find that her boss appreciated the initiative Alice showed and so she was allowed some time each day to do this research and see what she would come up with. In time, Alice produced some helpful tools that helped coworkers save time—the time it would have taken for them to find the resources. Alice also found that this added research time, where she could focus on using her investigative interests, left her energy less depleted at the end of the day, and all the more motivated for the next.

Do you want to discover or understand better your own natural interests? There are a number of online information sources and quizzes, to help you get started on discovering more clearly what are your particular natural interests. The one I use is for professionals found at cpp.com. Start here, though, if you do not have a professional to help you.